


No Dawn, No Day

by melonbug



Series: No Dawn, No Day [1]
Category: Voltron: Legendary Defender
Genre: Angst, Close Calls, F/M, Grief/Mourning, Implied/Referenced Torture, M/M, Mention of Starvation, Near Death, Post-Traumatic Stress Disorder - PTSD, Swearing, Violence
Language: English
Status: In-Progress
Published: 2017-04-23
Updated: 2017-10-24
Packaged: 2018-10-23 03:39:50
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 5
Words: 31,253
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/10711425
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/melonbug/pseuds/melonbug
Summary: They were broken people, but they were broken peopletogether. Without Keith.He couldn't be dead, Lance thought. He was too stubborn for that.Pre-Season2





	1. Chapter 1

**Author's Note:**

> This story has been in the works for too long, so here it is.

Lance didn’t find out how long he was stranded on ‘dinosaur-monster planet from Hell’ until after they found him. There was no discernable day or night on the planet, only an endless, dusty sky that burned his lungs as he breathed it. His scanner had told him the atmosphere was safe-ish to breath, which was good because his visor was cracked and compromised from the crash, but it was only safe insofar as it wouldn’t right away kill him. Go figure.

And of course, the planet was filled with dinosaur monsters, which he might have found _awesome_ except that they were trying to kill him. Constantly.

And Blue— They had come down hard, after being thrown from the wormhole, breaking the atmosphere with too much speed until the sound of warping, twisting metal had been enough to drown out Lance’s frantic yelling as the controls beneath his hands failed to respond, and failed to respond all the way through them crashing into the planet. He’d come to sometime later, helmet cracked, world spinning, spots dancing in the corners of his eyes.

But more importantly, Blue was down and out and useless to him against dinosaur-monsters, up until the moment she came online and blissfully, thankfully signaled the Castle of Lions.

Lance staggered into the hangar sometime and everyone was there: Shiro, who looked worn and tired and rough around the edges, and Pidge, who stood in his shadow looking small and fragile, and Hunk who, even as he rushed over to him, looked haunted and—

Hunk hauled him into his arms, crushing him in a tight hug, and he lost his train of thought. “Dude,” he said into his hair. “You _smell_.” He pulled back, grinning, but the grin didn’t reach his eyes. Lance didn’t comment on it and instead only looked to the other two Paladins present. Pidge looked worse up close and there was something off there he couldn’t quite place. Shiro dropped a hand onto her shoulder and she relaxed noticeably.

“You don’t look so great,” Shiro noted, and Lance made a face, sticking his tongue out at him.

“No duh,” he murmured, forcing a weak chuckle, and it tickled at his throat, at his lungs, and he staggered away from Hunk, wheezing and choking on the air. By the time the coughing fit passed he was barely standing and he realized, belatedly, that he was now being supported by both Shiro and Hunk.

“You, uh, you definitely look rough though, all joking aside,” Hunk managed at last, as Lance got his footing beneath himself again.

“S’not that bad, is it?” he asked, wiping his mouth on the back of his arm. Blood streaked through the dirt and the dust caking his skin and he blinked, feeling dizzy. “Oh,” he croaked out, looking up at Shiro, whose mouth was pressed into a tight line. “It is that bad. Huh.”

He’d been running off and on on adrenaline for too long and only now was it all catching up to him. Sluggishly he dragged himself to the medbay, both Hunk and Shiro still hovering close should he need it.

“Coran is there now, getting the pod ready for you,” Pidge said, her voice tight, and Lance nodded, tired, not thinking of it: of Shiro’s shadowed eyes, Hunk’s skittish looks, Pidge’s unsteady hands. Coran and Allura were waiting there, as Pidge had said. Allura’s eyes were soft but flickered with alarm at the sight of him. She looked exhausted. “Welcome back,” she said, smiling and he grinned at her.

“Good to be back,” he replied as Hunk helped him onto the exam table. He _was_ happy to be back, but he would’ve taken a Galra warship over the dinosaur hell planet. So it was all relative, really.

Coran fretted about him and Lance talked just to hear the sound of his own voice. “It was _awful_ ,” he told them, ignoring the pain in his lungs from drawing in air. “There were _dinosaurs_ ,” he managed, before launching into another coughing fit. None of them laughed.

“Lung damage,” Coran announced, at last, once he’d given him the pre healing pod once over. Lung damage, as if that much wasn’t obvious. He’d been coughing non stop since his arrival on the planet. “Malnourishment, dehydration, broken ribs,” he trailed off, swiping a finger across the side of Lance’s face, just beside a scar there that stretched along his hairline and down into his jaw.

Lance grinned, gesturing as wildly as he could to the spot. “One of the dinosaurs got me,” he explained, and he didn’t know what it looked like but he imagined it was a pretty _badass_ scar. He reached up and his calloused, cut fingers met the gnarled scar tissue there. He’d gotten it shortly after his crash landing.

He wondered how long ago that had been.

“Ladies love scars, right?” he joked, giving Allura eyes and she snorted, covering her mouth and looking away. Pidge and Hunk and Shiro all just stared at him and he pouted and sighed. It hurt, but it didn’t set off another coughing fit, which was nice. “Just get me in the healing pod, I guess,” he said and Hunk helped him up.

 

Hunk was there when he awoke to the cold woosh of the pod opening and he stumbled out into his friend's arms, choking down lung fulls of fresh, cold air with only the slightest hint of pain still in his lungs. Lance felt as if he hadn’t breathed in years and he pressed a steady hand to Hunk’s chest to brace himself as he gathered his bearings about him. He no longer hurt the way he had before: his face, the little aches and pains, the _bigger_ aches and pains. Most of it was gone. His ribs still hurt, but the healing pod couldn’t work miracles. Broken ribs would have to finish healing on their own.

He was still weak though and his hands shook faintly. “Food?” Hunk suggested and Lance considered it and then shook his head.

“Shower first, I think,” he said, crinkling his nose. “You’re right. I smell awful.”

Hunk laughed, slapping him on the back. “Glad to have you back,” he said. “We’ll wait for you.”

Lance savored the shower and he could have spent hours standing beneath the warm spray, watching weeks of dirt and dust and blood swirl down the drain. But he was hungry, too, and the hunger hurt like it had before the healing pod, and it was that hunger that finally drove him from his shower. But being properly clean again, after so long, did wonders for his fatigue and he stepped from the shower feeling more alive than he had in months, even with his still shaking hands.

His face, though, didn’t reflect the sentiment and he stood in front of his fogged mirror and suddenly understood everyone’s worried looks, the initial moment of alarm that had crossed Allura’s face at the sight of him. He did look rough: his eyes were sunken in, ringed dark; his hair was longer and wild; his face was thin and ashen; the scar running along the side of his face was gruesome. It ran from his hairline, just above his ear, and down to just above his jaw. And when he smiled it shifted and warped all the uglier.

Lance sighed. So much for a sexy scar like Shiro had.

The others were already in the dining hall when he arrived and he grinned at everyone as he stepped in. No one grinned back, but Hunk did stand and fill a bowl for him and Lance took it, thankful, dropping into his seat. “Still somehow better than dinosaur monster meat,” he said, taking a bite, and Pidge choked on her own food.

“Dinosaur meat?” she echoed and she sounded as tired as Lance felt. He flashed a big smile, but he didn’t really feel it. He was only tired and hungry and that was about the extent of what he felt.

“I told you,” he said, shoveling another bite of food into his mouth. “There were dinosaurs.” He shrugged. The dinosaur thing was starting to wear on him, now. It had never been cool beyond day one, or _whatever_ , on that dumb planet. “Had to eat something.”

Shiro nearly dropped his fork but didn’t say anything, and the silence that followed his statement was awkward and painful.

Allura and Coran were noticeably absent and—

Lance blinked, alarmed, food almost forgotten. Almost. He took another mouthful and chewed, looking around at everyone. There was something off, something missing, something—

“Where’s Keith?” he asked. They all exchanged glances among each other.

“We haven’t found him yet,” Shiro said at last. But they were all staring at him: Pidge, Shiro, Hunk, all of them with pinched expressions and hard eyes.

Lance frowned, abandoning his food completely. He was rapidly losing his appetite and the goo on an empty stomach was making him queasy. “I’m sure he’s fine,” Lance managed weakly but he could tell by how they were looking at him that there was something more behind the looks. Hunk was the first to break eye contact, clearing his throat awkwardly before going back to his food. “I— What’s going on?” Lance asked at last.

“We thought you were dead,” Hunk said at last, eyes still on his food.

Lance spluttered. “Why would you— I mean—” He worked his throat, trying to figure out how to respond to that. “We were all flung through—” He sighed, rubbing at his temple. He was tired, he was too tired. “Why would you think that I was dead? I mean, I wasn’t gone that long—” Something clicked and his stomach dropped and he met Shiro’s eyes. “How long has it been?” he asked, and Shiro furrowed his brow. “I mean, how long was I there? On that planet?”

“Almost one Earth month,” Shiro said softly and Pidge shifted in the seat to his right.

“Coran and Allura found them after four or five days,” Hunk supplied, looking at him again. “And me only a few days later, so—”

Pidge shrugged. She was acting the most strange about everything. Distant. “Shiro and I landed together. Junk belt, full of trash.” She gestured with her spoon. “Boring.” Her tone told him otherwise. He found it hard to believe that Pidge of all people would find a junk belt boring.

“Mermaid planet,” Hunk supplied between mouthfuls

“Dude!” Lance exclaimed and it was almost enough to kill the uneasiness that had settled over the room. “Mermaids, really?”

His face darkened. “I’ll tell you about it later. Wasn’t as exciting as it sounds.”

“Oh,” Lance said, stupidly. “And me—” He took a deep breath. They had thought he was dead. It had taken them more than two weeks after that to find him. “But— But what about Keith? _I’m_ fine, I’m sure _he’s_ fine. Right?”

Shiro forced a smile. “I’m sure he’s fine,” he said at last. Hunk gave a weak smile as well and Pidge— Pidge was quiet.

Lance picked up his bowl again, his hunger winning out over the uneasy feeling he was developing.

 

The days wore on and there was nothing. Allura and Coran traded quiet looks as they told them day after day that they were no closer to knowing where Keith was. No distress signal had come from the Red Lion and all tracking was as blocked as it had been when they were seeking the rest of them out. “Whatever hit us in the wormhole,” Allura explained. “It was enough to remove our connection to the Lions, and—” She bit her lip and looked away.

Coran picked up where she left off. “You were the only one to properly impact a planet, Lance,” he said. He was bright the way he always was but all of them were frayed around the edges. He was no exception. “And your Lion took the longest to come back online, because of the damage it sustained. It is possible his Lion is still too damaged to reach out to us.”

“But soon,” Allura said, smiling a smile that was anything but real. “I’m sure we’ll hear from him soon.”

 

Soon didn’t come. Soon turned into a week and a week turned into nearly a month, and in that time they all flitted about, awkward, unable to spend their anxious energy on much of anything. The Lions were still repairing themselves slowly, a sluggish drawn out process. Hunk’s was online, and the Black Lion was somewhere near useable, but Pidge and Lance both were Lion-less. So the whole ‘defenders of the universe’ thing had to go to the backburner as they all recovered, if recovered was the right word for it.

Regardless, they were missing Keith. And the Red Lion. And they couldn’t form Voltron and it was a huge blow to their entire purpose. They were all worried about him, about where he was, and the days wore on with increasing awkwardness as they all danced around the subject. None of them wanted to be the one to suggest it, as much as they were all thinking it, and they spent anxious moments awaiting word from Allura or from Coran that they had picked up a distress signal from the Red Lion.

But a month had come and gone and word never came.

Lance, in particular, was growing more frustrated, tired of the long silences. They were all of them not quite where they were. Shiro distant and at arm's reach, Pidge tepid and fidgety, Hunk unusually quiet. And Lance knew his time away was as noticeable as there’s was. There was an ache in his lungs still, a constant pain, barely there but _there_.

Sometimes he had coughing fits. He hid it from the others.

The healing pod, it didn’t work miracles.

He didn’t sleep well, between the coughing and his nightmares. None of them slept well. And they all refused to talk about it.

He threw down his spoon one night as they sat eating, letting the clink of it against his bowl ring loud through the silence. Everyone’s eyes swiveled to him and he drew in a slow, ragged breath. He suddenly regretted bringing attention to himself but he powered on through. “What if we don’t find him?” he whispered.

Hunk shifted awkwardly. No one said a word.

Lance pressed his mouth into a tight line, considering. Everyone was watching him, waiting for him to continue but suddenly he didn’t want to speculate further on the reason they couldn’t find Keith.

He couldn’t be dead, Lance thought. He was too stubborn for that.

“What are we going to do?” Lance asked, at last.

Eyes were no longer on him but flickering between him and between Allura, who sat staring down at her bowl of green goo. She’d been more and more absent lately, at arms length from all of them. She didn’t say a word.

But Shiro spoke. “I don’t know,” he said. “I don’t know.

 

If they put off acknowledging it long enough, then maybe the problem would go away. If they put off talking about it then maybe they would find him and they would never have to face the alternative. So they continued to not talk about it.

 

Their first time back in the Lions was a disaster. Blue wasn’t smooth anymore beneath Lance’s grip. She moved, certainly, but everybit of it was a struggle. _None_ of them moved quite right, as if removing Keith from the equation left them with too much of a hole to fill.

Lance opened his mouth, to direct Keith towards the forward position where he would be most effective, only to let it die on his tongue as again his absence reared it’s ugly head at them. This was no longer about losing a friend but about losing a partner. It was losing a vital part of their team. Keith had always been a hothead but he had also been a backbone, an essential member with heavy fire power who broke the enemy lines when some of the rest of them might have hesitated.

They won, against all of one warship and a small handful of fleet ships, but the battle was hard won and they came back tired and on edge and out of sync in a way that spoke of their struggles to fight side by side once again in the Lions.

And it was clear it wasn’t just a result of Keith’s absence.

Lance chewed it over later, biting at his lip, idle and restless as they had all come to be in the ensuing time since.

“What is going on?” Lance groaned.

He had followed Hunk to the common room after dinner and it was just the two of them. And dinner had been a long, painful experience. Pidge had looked sullen and Shiro had looked as if someone had kicked his puppy and Hunk had been tired, barely touching his food which was so very unHunk like that it had finally stirred Lance to start asking the hard questions. “I know there’s the obvious—” Keith, “But, I don’t know, buddy, there's something else and I—”

“Our lives, all of _this_ , it’s dangerous, it’s life and death,” Hunk whispered.

Lance was on the floor, back to the circular sofa, head tilted back against the cushions so he could better see Hunk, who sat working on his latest project. He had a screwdriver in hand and a small yellow box with an assortment of cords dangling from it and he was attempting to gently pry it open along a near seamless side. Lance thought he recognized it, maybe, as something from one of the Lions. His, if the yellow of it was any indication.

“We’ve always known that,” Lance countered, shifting, looking away. Not because the angle was awkward for his neck, it _was_ , but because he wasn’t really sure he was ready for the conversation this was leading to. “I mean, defenders of the universe and all, that’s dangerous stuff.” Lance dragged a hand through his hair, leaving it there. It was still long and messy. He hadn’t really wanted to cut it yet. It was growing on him. “I mean, we knew what we were getting into, right?”

Behind him Hunk stopped what he was doing and Lance could tell because of the silence that fell over them and that silence was deafening. He bit his lip, anxious. “It’s different now,” Hunk finally said. “It’s real, now. I mean, you nearly died and—”

Lance interrupted him. “I didn’t nearly die,” he corrected, and he felt it important to make the correction. “I mean, I’m fine now—” He glanced back and Hunk was shaking his head.

“But you had a close call, I mean—” Hunk gestured to the side of his face, mirroring the location of Lance’s scar. Lance looked away, slouching. “You had close _calls_ , Lance.”

“A few,” he murmured, not really thinking about it. That was how he had decided to deal with it. By not thinking about it. But it had been more than a few. A half dozen or so.

“We've _all_ had close calls,” Hunk added, “And Pidge and Shiro—”

“They won’t talk about it,” Lance noted. Pidge was more or less herself, now, outside of a bubbling anger she seemed to have. “Their time on that garbage belt, something happened, didn’t it?” And they didn’t talk about it and it suddenly occurred to him that it was little different from his own approach to dealing with his time away.

Hunk made a noise of assent and the soft sound of metal on metal returned as he went back to his project. “I think they were attacked. I don’t know, it’s not really our place to speculate on it, is it? But I heard Shiro talking to Allura, and—” He trailed off, hesitant. “I think there’s more to that then what they’re telling us.” There wasn’t too much more to say on the subject.

“What’s with those two, anyway?” Lance asked suddenly.

“Hmm?”

“Shiro and Allura,” he explained. “They’re like, _always_ together.”

Hunk laughed and it was nice. None of them really found much cause to laugh anymore. “Lance, if you don’t already know then I’m not going to tell you.”

Lance pouted but, to his great relief, the previous topic had been forgotten.

They could all go on not thinking about it or about Keith or about _any_ of it. It was working well enough so far.

 

It came to a head, eventually. It had to. There was only one direction for it and that was toward the inevitable. A defeat, a resounding defeat, was the tipping point. They’d been forced to retreat, with no real collateral damage save their pride and the Lions. They were targeting an en route resupply for an outlying planet. The goal, as Allura had told them, was to throttle the incoming resources going in enough to weaken them, so that they could attempt to liberate the planet, later.

A siege of sorts.

They didn’t get that far and the loss left an angry, bitter taste in their mouths. Allura had been quiet as they’d returned, mouth pressed into a thin line. Lance overheard a hushed, angry conversation between her and Shiro later and he’d known enough to know what they were talking about. They were falling apart as a team. With or without Keith, they were barely keeping it together.

And a loss was a loss, and Lance found himself restless that night and tired in an itchy sort of way, eyes heavy. He stumbled from his bed at what his clock said was past midnight, driven awake and driven towards the common room by some unknown force and he stepped in there to find everyone else. Shiro was on the floor, back to the sofa. Pidge was sprawled out across one and Hunk was on the other. None of them were sleeping. All of them looked somber.

“Where do we go from here?” Lance asked, standing in the doorway, and it didn’t feel like he was asking it to them. It felt like he was asking it to an empty room.

Pidge, though, looked at him, eyes burning. She looked as if something in her mind had just clicked, the way she often looked when she was working on a project. It put Lance at ease a bit to see her looking less on edge. “We have to start over,” she said suddenly. “From the beginning, we have to—”

Shiro was sitting up from his slouch, eyes soft with the realization of what she was saying. “We can’t keep doing this,” he said. “Pidge is right.”

Pidge was right and it wasn’t the sort of thing to be taken lightly. Pidge was almost always right, in Lance’s experience. Hunk and Pidge both. Hunk had an innate ability to read his gut and Pidge— Pidge just had an uncanny ability to be right.

“Training room,” Pidge said. It was a statement but it sounded almost as if she hesitated to phrase it as such.

Shiro nodded, slow, and Hunk seemed to follow along. Lance didn’t see a reason to not also go, and so they gathered themselves up, all of them in robes and pajamas and letting Pidge take the lead. The thought of Allura or Coran finding them like that, a strange procession off to the training room, made him grin and he wanted to laugh out loud at it but it didn’t really seem the time for it.

The lights in the training room came on blindingly as they stepped in and Pidge set about doing what she did, which was to begin digging through the technicals, fidgeting about with the control panel that ran the room, the gladiators, the simulations. Coran had been showing her how to run the ship down to the very last detail. Lance had come across them enough times, and Pidge was expert in what she was doing.

She gestured for them all to sit without even looking up. And then, once they were all settled onto the floor, she came over with an armful of devices that she handed out to each of them. They were the head pieces for the mind link simulator, Lance realized as she thrust one into his hands. He considered it for a moment before slipping it on over his messy hair. It buzzed lightly against his temples, tickling ever so slightly.

Shiro looked at his for too long a moment, turning it over and over in his hands. “Pidge is right,” Shiro said at last, looking around at them all. “We have to be a team again.”

“No more secrets?” Pidge whispered into the silence, dropping down to the floor as well so that they were all, finally, in a loose circle. Shiro was the last hold out, the device still in his hands despite what he had said. He took a deep breath and released it and then slipped it on.

“This is going to suck,” Pidge said dryly, and then the room fell eerily silent.

And then suddenly it wasn’t.

There was pain, that whistled hard through Lance’s chest, like a stake driven through him and he choked on it, clutching frantically at the spot, eyes watering, heart stuttering in his chest. He was going to die, he was going to die and—

A hand on his shoulder drew him from the panic that had taken over him and he looked over to see Hunk. His best friend was pale and looked ill and Lance realized, of course, that he could feel it too. “S’not real,” he murmured but his voice screamed out the pain they all felt. Lance thought he would die. He _was_ dying, the pain said, and he looked about, frantic and his eyes finally landed on Pidge.

This was a mind link, his fuzzy mind supplied. It wasn’t real, it wasn’t—

Pidge had her eyes closed, head tilted back and up and she was shaking, a hand curled in the same spot as Lance’s. Was it Pidge’s pain? Was it—

He didn’t know. The feelings all blurred together, his own panic, the pain, the hopelessness.  He could no longer tell where his own feelings began and the others started. A memory came to life in his mind, blurred around the edges, painful and frantic and played out in front of him, a projection of it flickering to life between the circle they had made, making it real on multiple levels. His breath caught in his throat, came out in desperate gasps.

There was blood in the memory, though Lance could hardly tell the memory from reality. He relied on the small things: he could taste the copper of blood in the air, could smell it, could feel it’s watery warmth beneath his hands. But he wasn’t there. He was sitting upright, where in the memory he was kneeling, hands pressed hard against a bleeding wound. He was muttering, frantic, _stay with me, Pidge, look at me_ , and he realized he was saying it out loud, echoing it and he swallowed thickly, willing the words to come only to his mind and not also from his mouth.

_it’s going to be alright_

It wasn’t going to be alright and his mind screamed it at him with all of the emotions of the memory and Lance squeezed his eyes closed, breathing heavy. When he opened them it was Shiro whose eyes were still closed and he realized in a heartbeat who it was. It was Shiro’s memory, and memory Shiro raised his eyes from the blood and the pain and they landed on Pidge’s face, Pidge who lay crying, mouth open in a shrill gasp as she struggled to bring in air, hair messy and bloody and frilled out about her head like a ghastly halo.

Lance’s eyes flew to her in alarm, where she sat to his right, and she was _fine_ , but her eyes were closed and her breath was a ragged shudder through her chest and Lance realized it was Shiro’s memory he was experiencing, but it was _her_ pain.

 _Shiro_ , memory Pidge gasped out, _I’m going to die, aren’t I?_

 _No, no Pidge, look at me, you’re going to be fine, you’re going to be_ —

Lance thought he might be sick, because he could smell the blood even though he wasn’t really there and he could feel it slipping between his fingers, and— He brought a hand up and pressed it to his mouth, squeezed his eyes closed, swallowed down bile.

 _Please, Shiro_ — “Don’t let me die, Shiro, _please_.” Lance choked and looked over and it was Pidge and she was echoing the words from the memory and then—

It stopped abruptly and Lance felt dizzy and terrified and empty and he lurched forward, catching himself on his hands before he could hit the floor. The entire room was silent save for his gasping and the sound of Hunk, to his left, barely keeping his stomach down and Pidge’s ragged breaths and Shiro—

Lance opened his eyes and looked over to Shiro for the first time since it had all started and Shiro looked dazed, eyes wide, and he was shaking, both hands tangled in his hair, trembling, on the verge of tearing at it. He’d pulled off the helmet and it rolled across the floor, spinning, until it came to a stop in front of Pidge. She took a deep breath and then looked at him. Lance held his breath because he didn’t know what to do or what to say or even what to feel after all he had just felt.

“What— what happened, what—” Lance tried to remember what Hunk had told him. He had overheard Shiro and Allura, they had been attacked. Pidge had been hurt. Lance felt dizzy.

“We were attacked,” Pidge said softly and a memory flickered through his mind, barely there, the strength of it weak: A blue skinned alien with a mean snarl of a face, Pidge’s pain, a faint hum, now, and then Shiro, lunging forward, his prosthetic arm a redhot blade, and—

Shiro had killed him.

“If Allura and Coran hadn’t come when they did—” Shiro’s voice was raw and his eyes were on his hands, now in his lap. The real one had a steady tremor. The fake one was unnervingly still. But even with the link severed Lance could see them in his mind, covered in blood.

Lance blinked and then again he wasn’t himself.

He was someone else, he was Hunk, standing at the end of a dark hallway. Allura and Shiro were around a corner, both sitting on the floor, backs to the wall, and Shiro sounded almost as if he were crying and Allura’s voice was a steady and soft lullaby just barely drowning him out. “—lions called out for us, Shiro—” she was murmuring, “—wasn’t your fault—”

Lance didn’t realize Pidge had been echoing it aloud until Shiro responded.

“It _was_ my fault,” Shiro said aloud and Lance blinked again and the vision was gone. It was again only the four of them, scattered in a circle, all of them with red ringed eyes and tear streaked faces and all of them shaking.

“It was,” Pidge agreed and it shocked Lance and his breath caught in his throat, eyes wide. “Is that what you want to hear from me?” Suddenly, it was as if they were the only two there. Pidge and Shiro and them alone, and Lance felt as if he were intruding on something incredibly private that he needn’t be a part of. He was a part of it, either way.

He looked over to Hunk and their eyes met. His best friend was ashen and Lance reached out a hand towards him and Hunk caught it, squeezing it tight. His hand was clammy. Lance’s own hand was clammy. He glanced between them and Hunk, bleary, and opened his mouth to speak only to be cut off by Pidge.

“Stay,” she said. Shiro was looking at them as well, but he looked ready to bolt from the room himself.

Lance took a deep breath and finally dropped Hunk’s hand. “Okay,” he breathed out.

“Okay,” Hunk echoed.

Shiro reached a shaky hand out and grabbed up the makeshift helmet, slipping it back on. Lance could feel the static again at his temple as Shiro joined the mind link and it was unnerving to be so connected to them all, so much so he was starting to struggle to understand where he began and where they ended. There was anxiety and horror and maybe some part of it was Shiro, or Hunk, or maybe that part of it was him and how he felt about it all.

He still felt ill.

He wasn’t surprised at Hunk, who sat beside him, strong in the face of it all. For all his squeamishness, Hunk was a solid force against the sort of things that often made Lance feel anxious and horrified and now he was more so and Lance could _feel_ it.

“It was my fault,” Shiro said again.

Suddenly Lance understood, because he could remember. _He_ was Shiro, and he was whispering, hushed, to Pidge, _go, I’ll distract him, get to the Lions_ , and he was Shiro when he lunged for the blue man, their attacker, and he was Shiro when the look on the man’s face triggered him and his breath stuttered to a stop and his heart lunged up into his throat and his vision blurred black around the edges and the man, instead, turned to Pidge who was jetting into sight, towards the Lions, and—

It was his fault. No, no, it was _Shiro’s_ fault.

“I don’t blame you,” Pidge added, after far too long a moment, when the memory had finally dissolved. She drew in a ragged breath. “You couldn’t have—” she swallowed noticeably, “It wasn’t your fault, Shiro.”

Shiro looked as if he maybe believed it, but his shoulders still sagged and his face, the bags beneath his eyes, the way they blinked, sluggishly, all spoke to something else, something none of them had the power to help or control. Words wouldn’t undo what the Galra had done to him, and words wouldn’t undo all that had happened to them.

“I don’t sleep either,” Hunk said suddenly and Lance looked his way, feeling dizzy. Hunk swallowed noticeably. “Not anymore, not since—” Mermaid planet wasn’t as exciting as it sounds, Lance remembered him saying. Hunk said he would tell him later but he had never gotten around to it and Lance had never thought to ask. It wasn’t that he hadn’t cared but things had a way of slipping to the wayside and Hunk was otherwise such a strong presence that he never thought to be concerned for him the way he had been with the others.

Hunk hmmed next to him. His hand was still pressed flat against the floor, halfway between him and Lance, where they had previously been clutching tight to one another's hands.

“Show us?” Pidge asked quietly, hesitant. She was more herself now, though. Her posture was one of relief, her shoulders lacking their previous tension, her eyes weary but not in the heavy sense, not the way Shiro’s always were and had always been. She looked almost at peace and she looked Hunk’s way with uncertainty.

Hunk responded with a feeling: horror and a sick churning that settled itself deep into Lance’s stomach. He wondered if that was the feeling of his almost constant motion sickness or of something else, but he didn’t have to wonder long.

Lance blinked and there was blue, endless, foggy blue. The depths of the ocean, he realized, and Hunk was in the Yellow Lion, yelling something indecipherable that Lance already knew was irrelevant to the memory, for the sheer white noise it took. The ocean floor was spotted with green and vegetation and bright spots of movement Lance realized must have been the mermaids. And among it all was a soft spiral of green, lush like a garden, the green fronds dancing lazily in the water.

It started moving, rising up slow and careful, slow enough at first that Lance may not have himself noticed except that Hunk had noticed and so Lance noticed it through the memory. Then it moved fast and it lunged, a serpent striking at the Yellow Lion like a snake, and Hunk dodged with ease in the water, his Lion rolling to the side. But Hunk’s eyes weren’t on the serpent, they were on—

Lance thought he would vomit and he slapped a hand to his mouth which was enough to almost pull him from the memory. Where the serpent had previously been nestled was a sprawling pile of bones, bleached white and stark against the otherwise sandy ocean floor. And there weren’t just a few but piles and piles and skulls rolled about as the water around them was disturbed by the serpent’s thrashing.

“They were being mind controlled,” Hunk explained after a moment. Lance wasn’t certain when the memory had ended but one second he was still reeling from it and the next he was cool and sitting again on the floor of the training room, sweaty hand pressed to his mouth. “By the serpent. And he led them to him one by one when he was hungry. She told me—” Hunk quieted, briefly, voice cracking. Lance didn’t need to ask to know ‘she’ referred to the Queen. “She said there used to be thousands of them, before the serpent came along.” Lance didn’t look at him, kept his eyes solidly on the floor. To his right Pidge was stiff and unmoving. He didn’t dare look at Shiro.

Hunk’s silence was finality, though, and Lance eventually had to look up, anxious, neck stiff from his position, tailbone sore from the hard floor. Hunk was done and now they were all casting wary glances at him.

“Oh,” he croaked feebly. “My turn?” He laughed and it cracked halfway through, his hands shaking. He felt on the verge of mania, at the edge of a coughing fit, and suddenly Shiro’s weary face became one of alarm.

“Lance,” he began, careful in his words. “You don’t have to—”

Lance shook his head, feverish. He itched beneath his skin. He wanted to show them, he realized. He had let it sit on his chest, the way they had all let it sit on their chests, and now it needed out. “No,” he said. “No, let’s do this.” He grinned and looked at them all looking at him. He wondered what his tells were, what they felt in their connection to him, now that it was _his_ turn, or _whatever_. Was it his mania? Was it that growing, crawling feeling he always felt when he was on the spot, the itch that drove him to speak up at all the wrong times, to make them laugh, to try and control every small thing going on, so that he felt less helpless?

He closed his eyes. “Dinosaurs,” he told them. “They fucking _suck_.”

No one laughed and he sighed and—

He was hungry. He was hungry and tired and itchy and it was _hot_ and he was trapped, holed up in an alcove-slash-cave maybe eight or nine feet up the side of a cliff. He didn’t know how long he had been there, because the sun never set, but his hunger had long since turned painful and the stench of rot wafted in from the ground below. He had taken one of them out on his way up, with a carefully aimed shot into it’s mouth as it had lunged for him. He didn’t know how long it had been dead for, but it was long enough to begin decomposing in the sunlight.

But the rest of them hovered there, taking turns tearing at the rotting body, waiting for him. And he was trapped, with nowhere to go. A slow death here, or a fast and painful death _there_. He was growing closer to the decision by the moment.

There was water, at least, a slow trickle of liquid running in a stream along the back corner of the rocky alcove. He wouldn’t die of thirst, though that would have been quicker than the current alternatives. Maybe he would die suffocating, because every so often his body would be wracked with coughs until he was struggling to get air, his body curled in on itself.

But the hunger was the biggest concern and the pain spreading along one side of his body. He supposed, given that it had now been so long he was somewhere close to starving, _maybe_ , it wasn’t going to be fatal. Certainly it would have already killed him if it had been. He wished it had. His current problem would have resolved itself.

He closed his eyes and, when he woke, there was silence. He knit his brow together, confused, trying to understand why that would be alarming or why it was strange or where he was and he pushed himself upright, weak, arms straining and shaking from the effort. It felt like forever before he was able to haul himself to the edge and when he looked down there was nothing there other than a mostly picked over carcass, the bones bleached white where they protruded through what once might have been flesh, and endless gray dust and cracking earth.

In the distance, he could see the Blue Lion, where it lay half on the ground, its face twisted awkwardly from where it had landed, mouth gaping open from where he had pried himself free of it. Stupidly, because that was how he had ended up in his current situation. Quick to run out into the open, to explore, rather than take even a half second to assess his surroundings.

He would die from his own stupidity. Fitting.

He wondered what Keith would have—

Lance moved cautiously, testing the ground beneath his feet, testing the strength of his legs. He was woozy and dizzy and unsteady but now was his chance, now might be his _only_ chance, because the monsters had decided they were bored of him for the time being. He took a deep breath and lurched forward off the edge, letting his jetpack boost him slightly so he hit the ground running, and the ground rushed up to throw him down, and the ground cracked and burst beneath his feet with every footfall, and sprays of water exploded around him. In the distance, the dinosaurs roared.

They sucked. Dinosaurs _sucked_.


	2. Chapter 2

They started training the next day and it was rough. Everyday after it was rough, until it was less rough and less rough and they finally, again, began to fall into a routine, fitting the gaps of each other like puzzle pieces. There was one piece missing from it all and none of them mentioned it.

It wasn’t fair to Keith for them to do so, but admitting they might never find him felt like giving up and any talk of Keith felt as good as an admission.

Lance burned at how much he missed Keith. He ached for what was missing from them.

He didn’t let himself think that he might be dead.

Another month went by, and nothing.

 

Then they hit the ground: running, instead of falling.

 

“We need a different approach,” Pidge said to them. They were gathered on the bridge and Pidge stood next to Allura in the middle of the room. She was looking up at the map, moving it slowly, carefully looking for something. Lance didn’t know what. “Intel is going to be our new best friend,” Pidge told them, finally turning from the map, pushing up her glasses. “We can’t form Voltron,” everyone knew why, it didn’t need explanation, “So we need to start doing targeted strikes. Get inside ships, get the intel we need, use it to lay traps and to single them out.”

“We’ve spent too long being defensive and not enough time being offensive,” Allura said. “I think now is the time to do something new.”

“Guerilla warfare,” Shiro murmured, considering.

“It’s fitting,” Hunk agreed. “We’re outnumbered, a million to one.” It was maybe an exaggeration, but it was one Lance found himself believing.

Pidge and Coran laid it out for them; They would hit and they would hit hard. They would hit those places vital to the Galra empire: resource heavy planets, communication satellites, small cargo fleets, space stations.

“They’re often manned by sentries,” Coran told them. “More efficient, that way. They’re robotic, after all. Nothing really gets more efficient than that.” Sometimes Lance forgot that Coran had been advisor to the King of Altea. Times like this he remembered, watching Coran lay out battle strategies like he’d been doing it all his life.

Maybe he had been doing it all his life.

Pidge held up her tablet and her hands shook slightly. Lance wondered how long it had been since she last slept. Too long, probably. Purple lettering flickered across the screen, foreign. “I’ve been working on decoding the programming language the Galra use. So far I’ve broken it down enough to understand it, derive what I need from it.” She grinned the way she did when there was a challenge placed before her. “I think I can compose a virus. It will slow them down, scramble the computers so badly they won’t know what we’ve grabbed and what we haven’t.”

“Hacking,” Shiro said. Shiro wasn’t a programmer. He was smart, but he was a different kind of smart. He was physics smart, and battle smart. He was a pilot, he had been the best pilot ever produced by the Garrison. Keith had been the only one to ever come close to him.

Sometimes even Shiro needed it translated into English.

Pidge nodded. “Of a sorts. With time, with more to work with, I might be able to program for infiltration. I can hack, but not with what I’ve got.” She hesitated. “Their programming languages are is complex, I need more time before I can get there.”

Allura finally spoke up again. “It will leave us down a Lion,” she said, “With Pidge inside, the Green Lion will be left behind.” There was a ‘but’ there, something on the tip of her tongue. She looked over at Pidge.

Pidge looked back at her before turning back to the rest of them. “Allura can pilot the Lions,” Pidge told them at last. Allura looked away.

Hunk groaned. “All this time, really?”

“It is not so simple as that,” she explained. “The connection you all have with your Lions, it is a natural one. The one I will forge will be an artificial one, for lack of a better word. I cannot say if all of the Lions will be agreeable to it. But in theory, I can pilot them, yes.”

“Blue would be amenable,” Lance said at last. He had so far felt useless to the conversation. He was one for technique more than planning. The procedure went over his head. It was what had made him such a poor pilot at the Garrison. “It’s just how she is. Agreeable, all around.” It was why she allowed Lance as a pilot, when he was clearly so unsuited for it.

_ Cargo pilot _ , Keith had called him.

“Besides,” Lance continued. “We’ll actually be down two lions. Someone has to go in with Pidge. Have her six and all.” He shifted where he stood, rolling on the balls of his feet. “It should probably be me.” He tried to say it with the air of confidence that said  _ obviously _ it would be him, but it fell flat.

“It does makes the most sense, Lance,” Shiro added. “You go in with Pidge, cover her. Hunk stays in action, I stay in action. We can take the biggest beating.” He wasn’t wrong. Hunk’s Lion was a tank, and Shiro’s was the most powerful of them all.Lance probably  _ was  _ the most obvious choice.

Keith would have been a better fit, though, to go in with Pidge. He was quicker, better at combat, his bayard more suited to it. But instead it would be him.

Pidge moved from foot to foot, tablet now tucked under her arm. “It’s not ideal,” she said. She had no doubt run this through her mind, run this past Coran and Allura. It was a solid plan, though. “But I think the intel we get and the impact it will have will be worth it. Besides, if this works, we should hardly need more than three Lions. Two would do just fine.” Small strikes against small fleets.

“So we’re agreed?” Shiro asked. He swept his gaze across the room. “It needs to be unanimous. We’re all in this together.”

Lance was the first to nod. The rest of them followed suit.

Lance was with Allura when Blue finally allowed her into the pilot’s seat. He hovered behind her, hands braced on the back of the chair. She was armored up, as if heading into battle, her hair tousled and thrown up hastily. She held tight to the controls and her hands fitted there awkwardly, hesitant.

Lance was nervous and he watched her hands move across the controls and he alternated between tightening and loosening his grip on the back of the chair, fidgeting. Blue, though, was calm beneath her hands. She was fine with Allura as a pilot. Lance, not so much. It wasn’t so much that he didn’t want her to. It was more that his bond with Blue felt special and it felt less special, sharing it with Allura.

Allura tilted her head back, sensing his nervousness. He was standing on the raised platform just behind the chair and she looked up at him with ease, meeting his eyes. She smiled. “It’ll be fine,” she said. “She likes me.” That was enough. That was enough to ensure she could pilot Blue. Not really enough to ensure they wouldn’t go careening into a sun. “I’m a fine pilot, Lance,” she added. “I pilot the Castle, after all.” Or she had. She’d been working to imbue her quintessence into it, a little bit over time. Coran, now, would pilot the castle. She’d worked hard to link it to him, in addition to herself.

“The castle is big and slow,” Lance countered, but a smile tugged at his lips. “It’s completely different. Apples and oranges.”

She quirked her lips. “An Earth phrase, I presume. Apples are different than oranges, yes?” She laughed.

“Something like that,” he said. He leaned forward, correcting her hand’s grip on the primary throttle lever. “Like this,” he told her. “It’s easier to move if your grip isn’t too tense.”

She hummed and made the adjustment. It made all the difference in her posture.

“Alright,” Lance said. “Let’s do this, I guess.”

Allura didn’t so much as hesitate before they shot out of the hangar, fast enough that Lance was nearly thrown back. He tightened his grip on the chair, eyes wide. Blue didn’t purr under Allura’s hands, but she was amenable. She listened well, so Lance trusted they wouldn’t shoot out into space and get lost.

Could you really get lost in space?  
“You sure you’re a fine pilot?” he asked, wary and she laughed, guiding Blue through smooth, fast, loops and dives. It was not unlike his own first time in the Blue Lion.

“This is brilliant,” she exclaimed instead of answering him. If Lance could see her face he was certain her eyes would be dancing. Blue was alive beneath her hands. Allura was alive in the pilot’s seat.

 

Her first time in the field with them didn’t go so smoothly. Blue yielded to her control, but there was only so much of a connection between her and the other paladins. She moved slightly too slow, slightly out of sync. Shiro took to issuing soft orders over the comms, where before they had reached a point where nothing but a thought was needed for them to fall in line.

It wasn’t a disaster, though. It was a work in progress.

All of it was a work in progress.

Their target was a warship, a lone scout, headed out to an unconquered edge. It was escorted only by maybe a dozen or so smaller fighter jets. Eezy peezy.

Allura drew the Blue Lion parallel to the warship, slipping up behind it, taking advantage of a blind spot that allowed her a few ticks to go unseen. It was barely enough time for Pidge and Lance to drop from the bottom hatch and slam roughly onto the top.

Lance took the landing rough, feet catching the ship’s surface oddly. Pidge tumbled, though, and hovered in space just above it, and he reached out and caught her, simultaneously driving a grapple into the top of the ship, winding the cable around his wrist to brace them there. He did it just in time, because the ship took a sudden jerk as one of the Lion’s cannons impacted it.

Pidge nearly went slipping from his grip and she let loose a litany of swears that were enough to make even Lance blush. Shiro laughed loud over the comms.

Hunk, though, was more flustered. “Pidge!” he exclaimed, aghast. She laughed, too, her jets pulsing her back close enough to drive her own grappled into the ship. It was easier to stay put, with the threat of tumbling through space.

A Lion latched to the top of a warship was something a warship would notice. Two lone paladins on the top, though, went unnoticed.

What they did was dangerous, but they could at least appreciate the danger. Lance thrived off of it, cable tight around his wrist. Pidge grinned in the face of the adrenaline. Carefully, they cut a hole in the hull and dropped in fast, before the breach could be repressurized by the ship. It wouldn’t stand out to the Galra. A brief hull breach during battle was typical. It was dealt with accordingly. Fast and swift and automatically.

Sentries rounded the corner and Lance took them down, one by one with quick and well aimed headshots. It ensured the sentries wouldn’t relay their presence to the rest of the ship, and even Pidge, overtime, became well skilled at catching them right in the head with her katar.

Lance excitedly began to refer to himself as the sniper, the better he got. He bragged, recounting the dozens of sentries he took out in mere seconds and Pidge laughed and rolled her eyes.

Every so often he took down a Galra soldier, their helmet containing the carnage, and he didn’t brag, then, he was only quiet and Shiro gave him a sad look, dropping a hand onto his shoulder as he passed

 

Their tactics worked better than expected.

“Do nothing more than twice,” Coran had told them. “Else they learn and they prepare for it, next time.” He was as well versed in strategy as Shiro, but he often fell back and let Shiro handle it. “Or else they will see us coming.”

They hit cargo ships the hardest, because they were underprotected and full to the brim with useful intel and even equipment, which they sometimes stole. Where the warships were an excellent source of tracking other warships and fighter jets and fleet travel, the cargo ships were awash in the smaller going ons. The cargo they carried told them where they were going and where they had come from. Their travel logs told them when and where and how well armed those places were. 

It led them to mining planets, labored primarily by sentries, as Coran had said, with Galra troops few and far between. Sometimes only with minor protection from a warship in orbit. Most of those planets no longer had locals. They all knew why that was. It meant, though, that there would be no reason to hold back, no fear of casualties.

They hit and they hit hard. They left no two stones atop each other. They razed the mining planets particularly hard, collapsing every building and every tunnel. It never took very long. It took them hours to destroy what the Galra had taken years to establish. It would take them months and maybe years to re-establish themselves there.

Those planets that they could, they liberated, one at a time. Those were few and far between. Too many of them had nothing left to liberate.

They were small victories that added up to something bigger. As good as a victory felt, as good as  _ many _ victories felt, they left a sour feeling settled in their gut. There were Galra soldiers on those planets. There were Galra soldiers in those warships. Their attacks were merciless and coordinated. They didn’t talk about the body count that came with that.

 

They were on a Galra ship when it happened.

Right before they’d gone in, Pidge had looked at him and grinned conspiratorially. “Want to do something stupid?” she asked quietly over the comms. Whether or not the others heard it Lance couldn’t say. They didn’t say anything if they did.

They were atop the ship, grapples in place. The cord cut hard into Lance’s wrist through the armor. He had smirked back as Pidge cut out their entry. They were already doing something stupid and dangerous. Why not up the ante? “Sure,” Lance had answered. “Why the hell not?”

Were they developing a death wish? Maybe.

It broke the monotony. Sometimes the adrenaline was all that they had to give them the edge they needed to keep going. 

They did this rarely, now. Never do anything more than twice, Coran had told them. The intel they got was usually enough to keep them busy for a solid month. Now, though, Pidge was looking for something in particular. She’d been tight lipped about what it was.

No more secrets, they had all agreed. She had told them with a manic smile that this wasn’t a secret. It was a  _ surprise _ . Pidge always had good surprises, the kind that turned into the coordinated attacks they did on Galra ships. So none of them had pressed her about it.

They followed the usual drill: make it to a control room, ensure the distractions from the attacking Lions made them unseen. Being seen wasn’t the primary issue. The ships were usually destroyed once he and Pidge had gotten what they needed. The key was to be unseen enough that their presence didn’t bring the full force of the ship’s sentries down upon them.

Going as unseen as possible kept them alive.

Now, Lance crouched close to her, eyes and gun aimed down the long hallway they had stopped in, at a spot where one corner led into another. It was a terrible spot, from a defensive standpoint, and Pidge was kneeling over a downed sentry, a cable run between it and her laptop.

It was stupid. It was definitely stupid. They already had what they’d come to get, they were ready for pickup, but they had stopped for this. “I think I can find a way to hack the sentries, remotely, perhaps,” Pidge had whispered to him, hurried, as they had downed it. “But I need to get into one, first.”

It was stupid and dangerous and Lance didn’t mind in the least.

Pidge was behind him. She frantically swore under her breath, cursing the download speed as if it might somehow quicken it. It didn’t and Lance could hear footsteps drawing near, not quite in their direction but  _ near _ .

“Pidge,” he murmured into the comm. “Need you to hurry.”

“Fuckin’ trying,” she hissed back. Behind him he could hear the rushed click clack of her fingers across the keyboard. That wouldn’t quicken it, either. Lance shot a quick glance back at her, growing increasingly nervous.

It happened in an instance. The nearby footsteps turned into nearer footsteps and that turned into a Galra soldier barrelling towards them. Lance fired and missed. He never missed. His hands shook around his bayard and the soldier slammed into him, tossing him into the wall like he weighed nothing and he hit the wall and crumpled.

He was one of the druid’s enhanced. Maybe the Galra had finally caught on; if they were stationing enhanced fighters on the cargo ships that had to be expecting them.

Lance fumbled where he had fallen, taking aim. He didn’t get to fire the shot. In the moment he had fallen, the soldier had lunged towards Pidge. Lance watched her react in a fluid movement, darting beneath his arms, throwing herself upward, using her jets to propel herself. She drove her katar into his head, through the soft spot behind his jaw, beneath his chin, where his helmet left him unprotected. It was a move Lance had watched her do in training against the gladiator.

This wasn’t a gladiator.

The Galra crumpled to the ground, dark blood seeping out around him.

Lance looked at Pidge and her hands shook around her bayard. She panted, choking down air and stumbled backward, nearly tripping over the sentry. Her eyes flickered from the body she was standing above and to Lance, meeting his gaze. It seemed to snap her out of it. She drew in a calmer breath and turned back to her laptop, a small beep signalling the end of whatever it was she had been doing. She closed it and snatched it up, stepping over the body, the Galra still twitching and bleeding out.

Lance pretended not to notice the smear of blood on the laptop, from where her hands had grabbed it up.

“We need to go,” she murmured. She didn’t need to tell Lance twice.

He killed three more of them on their way out. Pidge didn’t say a word.

Later, though, he found her in her room, going there to seek her out, because he knew what was coming. She was in the bathroom, curled over the toilet, sobbing and retching. Hunk had done the same during his first kill. It had been a month earlier.

Lance hadn’t. It scared him that he hadn’t. But he suffered in other ways, he suffered through nightmares and shaking hands as he cleaned blood splatter from his armor.

“Do you want me here?” he asked. She looked at him with hollow eyes. There was blood in her hair he hadn’t noticed during their frantic exit from the ship.

She nodded and the motion sent her face turning grayer. “Please,” she gasped out.

He held her hair back for her until she had nothing left to throw up and then he stayed the night. He sat on the floor, back to the bed, and somehow managed to fall asleep that way at some point. Shiro took his place the next night, and Hunk the night after that.

She didn’t really get better, but she did move passed it.

“It gets easier,” Lance told her. It was a lie. They had sworn off lying to one another, but this time he felt justified because he knew she knew it was a lie. None of them believed it for a second.

Still, the lie helped.

 

There was a class at the Garrison that all cadets were required to take.  _ Warfare and Psychological Health _ , it had been called. It was a freshman level course, designed to weed out who could handle it and who couldn’t. They all joked about it, about how the freshman class numbers dropped by half every year, as the incoming cadets took the course.

Joking about it like that made it easier to cope with.

Iverson taught it and Iverson was a hard ass. He didn’t pull punches; he gave it to them as it was, cut and dry. There was a reason the numbers dropped every year.

It was about the psychological impacts of war. Post traumatic stress. Nightmares. Vomiting. Shaking.

The causes. The killing itself. The horror that the killing got easier.

 

It was Pidge at his door, when Lance pulled himself from his bed one night and stumbled groggily to answer the knocking.

“Pidge,” he said, staring at her. He blinked a few times, half hoping it was a hallucination so he could just go back to sleep. Go back to trying to sleep. She didn’t so much as waver. “Pidge, it’s the middle of the night.”

She mumbled out a noise of agreement, eyes solidly meeting his. “It’s one in the morning, actually.” It didn’t feel like it was. It could have been daytime for all of how time felt aboard the ship. Lance couldn’t really tell the difference, except that he could never really sleep no matter what time it was or was supposed to be.

Lance stared back at her, and then his eyes darted behind her, briefly, looking for any reason that might have sent her his way at two in the freaking morning. No killer robots were in sight and the lights of the hallway remained dim. “Did you—” He looked her way again and met her eyes. They were not quite tired. They were manic, on the edge of too tired but too tired to sleep. Lance knew what that was like. Lance knew why when she finally averted her gaze.

She bit her lip. “I just—” Lance knew what she was going to say. She didn’t have to say it, but she did anyway. “I couldn’t sleep.” It had been maybe a week or so since the incident on the ship.

“What do you want to do?” he asked, stepping from his room. The door whirred closed behind him. “We could spar?” he suggested. She went pale and shook her head. Okay, so not a good idea then. “We could take one of the Lions out?”

She looked at him and seemed to turn it over in her mind for a long while. “Okay,” she said at last. “Green?”

“Sure.”

He followed her to the hangars in silence.

The Green Lion must have known they were coming because they arrived to find the ramp inside already down and ready. Pidge smiled, and smiled more when she finally dropped into the pilot’s seat. None of them got to pilot the Lions the way they had before. It was always for violence and destruction, doing what the Lions were designed to do. Their connection with them was stronger than ever but it was a heavy connection through how it had been forged.

Lance curled his hands around the back of the seat, as he did when he was with Allura while she piloted. Pidge, though, guided Green out far more gently than Allura ever did. He didn’t so much as stumble as they drifted out into space

Once they were there, the Green Lion moving along lazily, Pidge slipped from the seat. Green fell into her own path with no pilot and Pidge slid down until she was sitting on the floor. Lance dropped down across from her.

“I think I understand now, how Shiro felt,” she whispered. “When he—” She stopped and lifted her gaze to meet Lance’s. “I put you in danger.”

Lance frowned. He had never considered how she felt about that. They had both put themselves in danger. Lance had agreed to it the entire time.

“You could have been killed,” she continued. “I could have been killed.”

“We weren’t killed, though,” Lance told her. They were alive. Not well, but alive to see another day. Lance looked less forward to every day. He was tired. They were all tired.

“Mmm,” she murmured, looking away. “Still, if I hadn’t suggested it to begin with—”

“Pidge,” Lance said, cutting her off. She looked up, startled, eyes wide. “Every thing that we do is dangerous and stupid. That wasn’t any different.”

She hesitated and then sighed after a moment. She lifted her gaze upwards. “I can’t even hack the stupid things,” she told him. “All of that, and it wasn’t really for anything, in the end.”

Lance didn’t say anything. There were plenty of times when what they did had no payoff. What did payoff was worth all of it, though. She knew. They all knew and everything they did was unanimous. Even Coran and Allura had to agree before they made any move. “We’re all in this together.”

Pidge cracked a weak smile. “I guess we are, aren’t we?”

They felt silent and there was nothing but the warm reverberation of the Green Lion as she moved. Like a purr, Lance thought. The Blue Lion always did the same for him.

“It’s been six months, you know,” she said after a while. “Since we lost Keith.”

“Has it really been so long?”

She nodded. “I think he’s dead,” she said. Lance almost choked on his own spit. “I’ve combed through every piece of data I’ve gathered. I’ve made a program that specifically looks for anything about him or that could be about him. Or the Red Lion.”

Lance tightened his jaw. “That doesn’t mean anything, Pidge,” he whispered. “He could still be out there, somewhere. We have no reason to believe he’s even with the Galra.”

Pidge looked undeterred in her reasoning. Lance wasn’t sure if he wanted to fight her on it. Maybe it was easier for her to cope if she believed him dead. Maybe it gave her the closure they all needed on the subject. They rarely ever brought him up anymore, but they all wanted closure. They all wanted something to make the worry and the anxiety go away.

He looked at her and there was so much he wanted to say to her in that moment. Keith couldn’t be dead. He was surely out there somewhere, maybe he was waiting for them. Maybe it was the Red Lion that had been destroyed and he had no way to contact them.

Maybe he was already looking for them.

(maybe the Galra did have him and Pidge had missed it)

Lance bit his tongue.

Maybe he  _ was  _ dead.

“That surprise,” he asked her, desperate to change the subject. “That we went on that ship for? What was it?”

She looked at him, tired. “I was installing a trojan,” she told him. “So I could access data remotely. It didn’t work. It didn’t migrate to other ships, as I had hoped.” She stood moving over to the pilot’s seat again. “It was all for nothing,” she echoed.

Maybe it was. Maybe everything they were doing was for nothing.

 

Here was the thing about grief. It didn’t just go away. It didn’t conform to the Kübler-Ross model; It wasn’t so simple as that. Grief wasn’t a sequential path that moved them from one place to another, from denial to acceptance. They moved nonlinearly, they all occurred and reoccurred. Sometimes Lance was in denial. He was certain Keith was out there somewhere.

Sometimes he was closer to acceptance. Maybe he was dead.

Sometimes Lance was angry about it. It was like Keith to get himself killed. He was always reckless, throwing himself into fights without a passing thought to the consequences. He was no different than how they had all become. Lance blamed Keith for his own possible death.

They all grieved in their own ways, though. Pidge grieved by convincing herself he was dead, by accepting it so she might reach some point where she could move on.

Lance grieved in his regrets. He regretted every insult he had ever thrown Keith’s way. He regretted every bit of anger in him when Keith one upped him or outperformed him. He regretted all of the misplaced aggression towards him. He regretted all of the jealousy. 

Keith had never really done anything to deserve it.

(Lance regretted how he had come to feel about him. He regretted not telling him. He regretted being hostile to cover it all up. It had been easier, to be hostile, than to accept the warmth he felt when he was around him)

Lance couldn’t take any of that back.

 

If Keith was dead, Lance wondered what had happened to bring him there. How had he crashed? Where had he ended up? Did he suffer, the way they all had suffered?

Lance thought about it sometimes, his days on that planet. One long day so long he never  _ saw _ night, or perhaps days in which the sun of the planet simply never set. He couldn’t say, he didn’t know and he had pondered it at length. It had been a restless torture, the time between being attacked almost worse than the being attacked. The simple distortion of time there had put him constantly on edge, uncertain how often to sleep so much so that eventually he struggled to sleep, his body thrown from its internal rhythm.

What had Keith gone through? Had he even gone through anything at all?Maybe he died on impact. Lance had had a concussion, after his crash, his body had ached for what may have been a week or may have only been days.

 

“Hunk, I think I liked him,” Lance said. They were in the hangar, Hunk elbow deep in a sentry. Lance and Pidge had grabbed it on their last foray through a cargo ship. They had dragged it out while under fire. Hunk was still drowning them in his appreciation.

Pidge had politely declined looking it over.

Now Hunk was set to work on it. He wanted to see if they could reverse engineer it and if he could it would all have been worth it. He could replicate it, maybe, build one or some. Or maybe he wouldn’t be able to at all, but it was a project to work on in his spare time.

Hunk lifted his head from where it had been half buried in the belly of the sentry. “Who?” he asked. There was a smudge of grease on his face, his hands dirtied up close to the wrists with it.

Lance hesitated. He was lounging on the floor nearby, back against the wall but he shifted so that he was sitting up straighter. “Keith,” he said. He’d been thinking about it a lot more, his regrets, the growing feeling he had been hiding behind his lashing out at him. He had—Lance drew in a ragged breath that set his chest to tingling. It was better not to think of it, now. It felt wrong, to put those feelings onto someone who was now gone. Maybe he was only projecting. Maybe he only really felt those things so strongly because Keith was now gone and it was a weird way of coping.

He was going to talk about it anyway, though. He needed it off his chest.

Hunk stilled, looking his way. He didn’t say anything. Lance continued on, letting it go.

“I guess I just, I don’t know. We were rivals, you know?”

“I know,” Hunk said, carefully. “I know how you felt.”

Lance sighed and let his head fall back against the wall with a thud. “Did everyone know?”

Hunk shrugged. “I don’t know, man,” he said. He stuck his hand back into the sentry, pulling at some cables. His attention, though, was still firmly on Lance. “I think sometimes it was obvious. You always gave him this  _ look _ when you thought he wasn’t looking.”

“Do you think he noticed?” Lance asked quietly. Hunk looked his way, eyes soft.

“I don’t know,” he said.

 

Lance came across Shiro in the hangar one night, maybe seven or eight months without Keith, without the Red Lion.

Shiro was on the floor, back pressed to the leg of the Black Lion, and Lance almost didn’t see him; he had found himself there through sheer restlessness and he had expected to be alone. It was the kind of night where he had given up finding sleep and had resigned himself to a day of fatigue the following morning. It was tomorrow’s problem, and tonight’s problem was apparently Shiro and the wretched look in his eyes when Lance came upon him.

“You can’t sleep either, can you?” Shiro asked, eyes meeting Lance’s. Shiro didn’t often speak about his sleepless nights. They all just knew and it wasn't something he needed to make more real for himself by discussing it when he didn’t really want to. He must have wanted to.

Lance made a noncommittal noise. He wasn’t particularly in the mood to talk about it, himself. It had been dusty, in his dream, and quiet in a way that wasn’t okay, and he hit the ground running and— He’d woken in a coughing fit which wracked his body. He supposed it was better than waking up another way.

Hunk told him that sometimes he woke up and heaved up his dinner. Pidge had quietly told him the same. Sometimes she went days without sleeping.

She still dreamed of dying, she told him. She dreamed that she died and never got to tell Shiro she didn’t blame him. sometimes she dreamed of killing.  _ it does get easier _ , she whispered,  _ but not any less horrible _ .

Shiro, though, dreamed of torture. Their problems seemed a far cry from his, but he was always the first to be there for them, the first to direct a comforting gaze their way, or to pull one of them aside for a quiet conversation. He was always the last one to talk about it.

But Lance remembered his choked out  _ I don’t know, I don’t know _ , so many months earlier, when the days had felt empty and too long and the idea of finding Keith still gave them a flutter of hope. All of that was gone now.

Lance hesitated, unsure if it would be intrusive to join him, but Shiro gave him a weary smile and patted the ground next to him. Lance dropped into it. The Black Lion was cool against his back. Neither of them talked, they just sat there, content with each other’s presence, content to not be in their respective beds, tossing and turning, waking with broken sobs.

“He was always my favorite,” Shiro said at last. He’d tilted his head back and his eyes were on the glow of the lights high above them. “It wasn’t fair to the rest of you, but I played favorites and he was my favorite.”

Lance considered lying and the lie was already on his tongue before he stopped himself. No more secrets. No more lies. “I know,” he murmured. “We all knew.” They had. Every smile directed towards Keith and not towards one of them hadn’t been an issue at first, but it had hurt as time wore on. Shiro, their strong leader. Shiro, their imperfect leader. Shiro, who played favorites unfairly. Lance didn’t really blame him. Of all of them, Keith had needed the firmest hand. Keith was the kind of person that people naturally gravitated towards. Lance had resisted it the most, for reasons only now becoming obvious to him.

“I’m sorry,” Shiro told him, at last. “It won’t make up for it, but I’m sorry.” He shifted and Lance looked over at him to find Shiro looking back.

Lance shrugged. There was no point dwelling on the past, now, with so much future ahead of them. Maybe ahead of them. What they did was dangerous. Already there had been a casualty. The question he really wanted to ask Shiro burned a hole in his tongue. It had been burning within him for a month. “We’re never going to find him, are we?” he asked.

“I don’t know,” Shiro said and Lance sighed. He wanted an answer. He needed a yes or a no, or something. He needed more than an ‘I don’t know’ but they all had that. All they could ever say was ‘I don’t know.’ Lance was approaching a different answer. He was approached ‘no.’ Even if they found him now, things wouldn’t return to normal.

They had built something between them. They had built it without Keith.

“I always thought he would lead the team, if something were to happen to me,” Shiro whispered.

No more lies. Lance cracked the faintest hint of a smile. “That’s dumb,” he said. Shiro laughed.

“It was,” Shiro agreed. “In hindsight.” He made a noise that might have been a sigh. It might have been pain. Lance knew his arm bothered him sometimes, no matter how hard he tried to hide it. “I think, now, it would be you.”

Lance tensed, eyes wide. It made him ill to think of it. “Me? Really? Did you fall and hit your head?”

Shiro didn’t laugh this time. His gaze was intense and it pinned Lance to the spot when all he suddenly wanted to do was avoid this conversation. “They listen to you,” Shiro explained at last.

“Hunk would be better,” Lance murmured. “He’s—” Lance danced over the words, trying to find what he was trying to say. It had left him the moment he went to say it. He let it speak for itself instead. Hunk just  _ was _ .

“Hunk wouldn’t want it. But you would know that better than me.”

Lance released the breath he had just drawn in. He felt on the verge of a coughing fit. They came on worse when he was on the verge of mania, when his mind began to move too fast and his heart beat too fast. Strain. Stress. He swallowed, taking in another, slower breath. “He wouldn’t want it,” Lance agreed at last.

“And Pidge is so young.” Not too young to kill alongside them.

That only left him. “Are you choosing me because I’m the better choice or through process of elimination?” Fitting that he would be chosen only for that fact that he was the only one it could be.

“No,” Shiro said. “You’re the obvious choice.” He paused and seemed to think for a moment. The moment passed. “If Keith were here right now, I would still choose you.”

Lance was determined to fight it. “I’m as impulsive as he was.” Is, he bit his tongue, angry he had let it slip. Shiro didn’t comment on it. “I—” He was exhausted. He stopped fighting it. It wasn’t that he didn’t want it. He would take it in a heartbeat.

“You act on instinct, not on impulse, Lance.”

“I know.”

“You’re alive right now and—” Shiro let it die on his tongue. Lance made no attempt to pull it from him. “You’re too hard on yourself,” Shiro murmured at last.

Lance looked away from him. “I feel like I don’t really have a proper role on this team,” he admitted. “I barely even pilot my own Lion, anymore.” He did in combat, but they spent a lot of time doing strikes, he spent lot of time with Pidge on ships or with Pidge planting traps. It felt like Allura piloted Blue more than he did.

“We couldn’t do what we do without you, Lance,” Shiro assured him. “You’re vital.”

“I was just a cargo pilot,” Lance corrected. “And I was on my way to flunking out of the Garrison.”

Shiro snorted. “Lance, Keith was thrown  _ out _ of the Garrison.” 

Lance laughed. “He was.”

“Don’t compare yourself to the rest of us, though,” Shiro continued. “You’re just as essential to the team as the rest of us. I’m picking you for a reason.”

“Do you expect something to happen to you, though?” Lance asked at last. His tongue felt heavy. He felt dizzy. He felt his breath come more labored.

“I think I did for awhile, yes.” That was the end of that.

“Lance,” Shiro murmured after a while. Lance let his head fall sideways to look at him. “Are you aware you do that?”

Lance blinked, frowning. “Do what?”

Shiro gestured to his own face. “When you talk to us, you favor one side of your face.”

Lance reached up a hand and brushed his fingers over the scar there. It had settled into his skin, with time, becoming less severe, but it was still ugly and still had that strange itch that scars sometimes had. “I didn’t realize, no,” he told him. “I barely even remember it’s there anymore. It’s like— It feels like it’s been there all along, you know?”

Shiro smiled and it crinkled his own scar where it ran across the bridge of his nose. “Yeah. I know what you mean.”

 

They had all come to find it comforting, to be near their Lions. It wasn’t uncommon for them to find each other in the hangar, during their sleepless nights. Lance had found Shiro there, after all. Even Allura was sometimes there, sitting in the pilot's seat of the Blue Lion, hand splayed out over the smooth control panel.

“You’re going to make me jealous,” he told her when he found her there.

Allura had laughed. “She likes you more, Lance. She always will. You’re her paladin, after all.”

It was different for Allura. The horrors they encountered she also encountered, but she had a way of pulling back from the rest of them. Maybe she handled it differently.

Lance found her with Shiro a lot. Once Shiro had mentioned, in passing, that Allura helped him to sleep. Her quintessence had power, though she rarely used. She used it for him, though, to quell his nightmares. Maybe Shiro helped her sleep as well.

Maybe that was why she remained so much more composed than the rest of them. She had been raised in the war, she had been raised with the Lions and with Voltron and with Zarkon hurting her people again and again. Killing them all, every last one until it was only her and Coran. None of them could match that.

Slowly, Allura had formed a bond with the other Lions, such that they allowed her to pilot them. It was her ability to manipulate quintessence, she told them. They bowed to her will, it was only a matter of her making that happen gently.

She never managed the finesse or the control over them that their paladins did, but it was a blessing in its own way, to have her there. Sometimes Allura piloted the Blue Lion, when Lance was shaking and she noticed. Sometimes she piloted the Green Lion, when Pidge stumbled into the hangar, face ashen. Every so often she piloted the Yellow Lion, when Hunk came in, eyes tired, steps heavy. It was rarer. He had become a rock for them. He hid it better and he handled it better.

He would have made the best leader, despite what Shiro said. But Lance knew inside he would never accept the role.

Allura, though, never once piloted the Black Lion. It was the only one to refuse her. Shiro weathered it and they all appreciated it. He made the sacrifice they sometimes couldn’t make. But it happened less and less as time went on. Allura mostly only piloted the Blue Lion now, when Lance went into ships with Pidge.

She was ruthless. She was different from them.

Coran took over the Castle of Lions when Allura wasn’t there. She had slowly begun to infuse her quintessence into the controls so that he could pilot it and wormhole if necessary. He ran the communications, he transferred the blueprints and the scans and the various points of life within ships to Pidge and to all of them as needed. He was a good tactician, a strategist. He was calmer than them, so removed from the fight.

Their guerilla warfare was becoming vicious, it was becoming enough to warrant Galra pushback. The Galra pushed back hard. They pushed back harder.

They were still a long way from victory. They were a long way from facing down Zarkon. But they were making a noticeable difference.

 

It was nine or ten months since their tumble through the wormhole, and it was Pidge that broke the news to them.

It was late, maybe the middle of the night. Lance hadn’t looked at the clock and he hadn’t been sleeping when Pidge had quietly called them through the intercom. Now they stood on the bridge, every one of them, alert though there was no apparent danger. Lance was relieved. The last few weeks had been attack after attack. 

Pidge was quiet, though, and the lights on the bridge remained dim under its night settings. Pidge could have changed that in a heartbeat but she didn’t. Somehow it set the mood of what was to come. Lance didn’t know what that was but Pidge did and the look on her face was enough.

Beside him, Hunk managed a yawn. Lance was jealous and he shot him a look. Hunk only shrugged. To his left, Shiro looked as if he had been sleeping as well. Allura stood next to him and Lance hadn’t missed the way their hands touched when they’d first stepped in. Lance was jealous they had been asleep, but he was glad for it. Shiro, especially.

Pidge fidgeted, awkward. She was putting off what she wanted to tell them. She was biding her time. It couldn’t last and after a bit she looked up at them. She managed to avoid contact with everyone, and there were four of them in front of her and it was almost an impressive feat. “In the last few bits of intel we gathered, I came across something.” Shiro bristled beside Lance. “I know, I know, Shiro,” she continued. “I know I should have told you guys, but—” She bit her lip. “I didn’t want to say anything until I was absolutely certain. I—” She sighed, lifting her glasses enough to rub at one eye with her palm. She had never been one for sleeping like a normal person, even before. Lance wondered how many sleepless nights she had put into deciphering their intel.

“I found the Red Lion,” she whispered. Lance’s heart did flip flops. He felt faint. Not in a bad way but in a way that almost felt like floating. Allura stiffened where she stood near Shiro, taking a step forward, eyes wide. Her hair was down and messy and as she moved it spilled over her shoulders, blocking her expression from Lance, where he stood.

Pidge hesitated and looked to where Hunk stood, meeting his eyes. Oh. Hunk knew. She had already spoken to him. She looked around at them, chewing at a thumbnail, waiting for a barrage of questions that didn’t come. Lance had a million questions but, like the rest of them, he held back, waiting for her to continue.

“The Galra have it,” she said. “They’ve had it for a while. It was there all along, in the data I was pouring over. I just missed it.” Her voice ran ragged. Her hands trembled around her tablet. “They had it coded as a warship. It didn’t stand out until I came across a mention of it as a Lion in passing, a week or so ago. It’s been right there in front of me this whole time.”

No one said anything, all of them too shocked. After a moment Hunk spoke up. “They hid it,” he added. “The Galra, they intentionally hid it in the data, she—”

Shiro looked at him. “No one blames Pidge,” he said quietly. He looked at Pidge. “We don’t blame you, it’s not your fault.”

“They’ve had it for months, Shiro,” she told him. Her voice cracked as she spoke.

“How long?” Allura asked. “How long in total?”

“What I found goes back four months, but it could have been longer. It could have been since the beginning.”

“Well, we have to get it back,” Coran chimed in. None of them disagreed. “Where are they keeping it?”

Pidge shook her head. “You don’t understand,” she said. “They didn’t just code it as a warship to hide it, they did it because they’re using it. They have a  _ pilot _ . They’ve  _ made _ it a warship.”

That set them off and Shiro tried to speak at the same time as Allura, at the same time as Coran. It was Allura that got the word in. “How? The Red Lion—” She trailed off and Lance could tell she was trying to put what she wanted to say into words. “It’s temperamental. It won’t just let anyone pilot it.” She looked at Coran. Coran looked back at her. “The Galra, they had it before. And they weren’t using it then for a  _ reason _ .” It sounded personal, the anger in her voice.

“What about Keith?” Lance asked at last. Everyone looked at him and Shiro looked almost embarrassed it hadn’t been his first question. “Is he— Did you find out where he was?”

Pidge looked at him. Pidge, who had so confidently said Keith was certainly dead. “No,” she whispered. “I couldn’t find anything about Keith.” She raised up her tablet and typed across the keyboard for a moment. In front of her, the map came to life and zoomed in until only a system was visible, one that Lance didn’t recognize. “I know where it’s heading, though. The Red Lion I mean.”

“Well, we should start planning then,” Coran said.

“We have two days,” Pidge told them.

_ Well, shit _ , Lance thought.

 

The plan was simple.

The Red Lion would be accompanying a fleet of ships towards a far outer planet. It was full to the brim with the alloy used to build their warships and the goal of the fleet was to establish a presence there, to begin building and mining operations immediately.

“It is vital to them that this not fail, hence the Red Lion’s presence there,” Pidge had explained to them, adjusting her glasses. It was a nervous motion. “With all of the havoc we’ve been wreaking, they need this planet and its resources more than ever. It’s uninhabited, shouldn’t be an issue.”

“Our primary goal is the Red Lion,” Shiro said. They had all agreed on that front. “Secondary goal is to stop those ships.” But it wasn’t essential. A failure on that front wasn’t an end all be all. They could go back later, take the planet.

A failure on getting back the Red Lion was not an option.

It was Hunk and Pidge and Coran that laid out the plan, over dinner. Pidge started off. “Our priority needs to be getting to the Red Lion fast enough to put it out of commission. Against it and the fleet accompanying it, we barely stand a chance.” Three warships, if Pidge’s information was correct. One for each of them. Three cargo ships, full to the brim with sentries. Cargo ships had weapons of their own. And then the Red Lion, to make it harder.

They could take out three warships. Shit, they could take out four . But none of them really knew if they stood a genuine chance against the Red Lion. She had been the fastest and most aggressive of all of the Lions. She would go down fighting, tooth and nail.

“Allura, you’ll pilot the Blue Lion, fly it parallel to Red, long enough for Lance to drop down.” Hunk looked over to Lance, pointing with his spoon. “Lance, you’ll need to pry your way in through the top hatch. Once you’re inside, take out the pilot.”

“Now, Lance, you’ll be dead in the water from then on out,” Coran told him. Lance knew as much. There wasn’t a chance in hell the Red Lion would then allow him to pilot her. “Now, any one of you paladins can do the drop into it, if you would rather not do it.”

“But I’m the best equipped,” Lance supplied.

“You’re the fastest of us,” Shiro told him. “And you’ve dropped into ships like this before. You’re the obvious choice.” Lance was hesitant to admit he enjoyed that part, clinging to a ship as it hurtled through space, prying his way into them, weapon at the ready.

“Sure,” he said with a shrug. “I’ll do it. Absolutely.”  _ Absolutely _ . He was all too eager for the chance to potentially avenge Keith. Take his Lion back. Bring it back to where it belonged.

Pidge cleared her throat, returning their attention to her. “Now, I haven’t been able to find out much about the pilot,” she added. “Galra soldier, possibly druid enhanced. You’ll have to move fast.”

“Fast is my middle name,” Lance told her with a grin. “Don’t worry about me, I’ve got this.”

The rest of them would keep Red distracted enough for him to get inside. They would engage the warships from there, as they could. Coran would prepare to wormhole, the moment they finished or felt they needed to retreat.

It was a solid plan. It was simple.

 

They wormholed in in the middle of it, just as the ships reached the outer edges of the planet’s atmosphere. They had run a bunch of calculations and deemed it the best time to drop in, the best time to catch them off guard. Already at the planet without incident, the Galra would be unprepared, instead making preparations for landing.

The Red Lion was prepared though. That’s why she was there.

It was Pidge that led the charge. They all agreed her best to lure Red away before the warships could react. She was the next fastest Lion, after Red, and she shot away from the rest of them and towards the Red Lion. Lance could hear her voice bleeding through the comms.  _ C’mon c’mon c’mon _ . She darted close, sent a beam of green light the Red Lion’s way, and Red took the bait immediately, launching after her and further into space.

Allura followed after them in the Blue Lion, Lance behind her, barely standing with the ferocity with which she piloted. This was personal for her. Her father had been the paladin of the Red Lion, she had told them once. And now the Galra piloted it and used it to hurt others.

Pidge saw them heading that way and she maneuvered fast, heading back for them, leading the Red Lion into position. They wouldn’t have long, once she was where they needed her. Lance stood above the bottom hatch and waited. He’d have to move fast. Very fast.

“Almost, almost, almost—” Allura gripped the controls tight, leveling them out above the Red Lion, trying to bring Blue closer while Pidge distracted her. “Go!” she cried out at last and the floor dropped out beneath Lance.

There was something about traversing through space that always made Lance anxious. Maybe it was the lack of gravity, maybe it was being swallowed alive by darkness. But every drop from a Lion and onto the top of a ship was nerve wracking right up until the moment his feet made contact. This was different, though, this was smooth, where it should have been anything but. It was him, clinging to the top of the Red Lion with nothing but a sharp ragged point of metal driven into it and cord securing him there. It was him and the endless space around him, the vaguest feeling of free floating. It was him and the battle raging around them.

Pidge would have been grinning. Lance wished she were with him, but they needed all Lions on deck. He didn’t think about it and only focused on twisting the grapple enough to wedge open the hatch. It opened smoothly and with a surprising amount of ease and he dragged himself inside. He landed with his finger already on the trigger of his bayard, aimed and ready to shoot.

He didn’t shoot. He wasn’t sure what stayed his hand, because any hesitation could have meant death. But he  _ did _ hesitate, and it gave the pilot enough time to stumble from his seat and against the console, back pressed against it, weapon brandished and—

Lance recognized him from his bayard, first: a red sword directed his way. Then he recognized him from his armor: dirtied and dinged but unmistakably white with red accents all across it. Then,  _ then _ , Lance recognized him from his face, though barely: light purple skin with yellow eyes, something that might have been fangs bared, wild black hair.

Lance’s bayard shook in his hands, still trained on Keith’s head. Neither of them moved.

Keith’s hands, though, shook where they gripped his bayard. “L—Lance,” he stuttered out. It sounded as if it killed him to say it. He lowered his bayard and then dropped it all together.

_ Lance? _ Allura murmured down the comms and Lance tensed. He wanted to drop his gun, he wanted to aim it anywhere but at Keith’s head.  _ Lance, confirm you’re in, Lance? _

_ We need to retreat _ , Shiro said, almost drowning out Allura’s voice.  _ Lance, we need to know you’re ready to go _ . They were to tow the Red Lion back to the hangar, the moment he gave the word.

“Yeah,” Lance breathed back. He took a step forward and Keith tensed. “Good to go.”

Then Keith moved and it was fast, snatching up his bayard in a smooth motion. Lance wished he could say he thought twice about it but he couldn’t. He didn’t think at all, just raised his bayard and slammed Keith in the head with, cracking his helmet, sending him crashing to the ground. He didn’t move again.

“Yeah,” Lance said again. “Come and get us.”


	3. Chapter 3

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> BIG OL SHOUTOUT TO [oldmythologies](http://archiveofourown.org/users/oldmythologies)

They put him in the healing pod before he regained consciousness. Coran, though, had told them quietly that there was little there to heal. Keith would go into cryo the moment it was done. It would give them enough time to decide what to do.

“It is really him,” Coran had assured them, which only left the question of  _ why _ .

It was difficult to not want to dance around it. None of them wanted to accept the obvious, just as they had never wanted to accept that he might be dead. There was a relief that he was there in front of them now. There was a horror as to why.

Coran was clinical as he broke it down. He spoke as a doctor might, in a comfortable monotony. “There’s scarring around the temples,” he told them, gesturing to the pod. “Scarring around the neck. Preliminary scans show altered brain activity, odd neurological patterns.” Coran rattled it off as if from a list. It was a breakdown of the readings from the pod, nothing more. Coran had little more ability than they did to interpret what the digital screen in front of him said.

“Mind control?” Hunk suggested. His eyes were on Keith and though he sounded hopeful his shoulders had the telltale sag of weariness and something maybe bordering on despair. Lance felt the sentiment. All of them were still in their armor, straight from their Lions to here. The battle had been hard, towards the end. A retreat had been a possibility since they had first come up with the plan. Still, it was a hardfought retreat.

Hunk’s suggestion, though, was the kind of thing they all wanted to believe. Lance remembered what Hunk had told them about his time on the mermaid planet, back when all of this had started. They had been mind controlled. Maybe Keith had been mind controlled, too.

Coran shrugged. He looked tired himself. Piloting the Castle, being the  _ only _ pilot on the Castle, did it’s own part to wear him down. He channeled Allura’s quintessence through himself. It did its number on him. “Perhaps,” he said at last, after turning the thought around a bit. He cast a glance towards Keith. “But doubtful. Mind control implies there is something nearby to control him. It would never be able to extend so far away. No signs of any such thing. But definitely signs of tampering with his brain.” He made a lazy loop beside his temple with a finger. It seemed the gesture for the crazies was universal.

The thing about space was that there was very little to mark the passage of time, but their hair still grew, their bodies still changed. Keith was no different, he was taller, though barely, and his hair was a mess and his body, which had once been toned and well muscled, was now scrawny and thin. But he was also Galra: his skin purple, his ears warped and long, his fingers ending in clawed tips. “Why is he like that?” Lance asked, breaking the uncomfortable silence that had fallen over them. He stepped forward and pressed a hand to the glass. He would have to clean it later. He was always the designated cryopod cleaner, if only because he was now the fastest and most efficient at it. He wanted to touch Keith though, wanted to remind himself that he was well and truly there.

“He’s always been like that,” Pidge whispered suddenly and Lance let his hand fall away, glancing over to her. She sat on the exam table, her legs swinging softly. She’d been the most quiet since they had pulled him from the Red Lion.

“Number five is right,” Coran supplied.

Pidge hesitated, then, looking down at the ground. “Our DNA is stored in the system. If we’ve ever been in the pod, then it’s there.” They all had been, at some point or another. Pidge raised her head, looking straight at Keith. “I came across it once, when I was going through the system, learning how the pods worked. His DNA is different than ours, noticeably so. His closest match in the system was, uhh, Sendak.” Sendak had been in the pods once, too. Shiro, where he stood near Lance, shifted. They all knew why the Galra was no longer with them.

“So he’s always been Galra?” Hunk asked.

Pidge shook her head. “Not Galra,  _ part _ Galra. Mother’s side, if I were to warrant a guess.” She shrugged. “I’m not really an expert in biology or anything.”

They all fell silent. Shiro looked at her. Lance couldn’t read what was behind his eyes, but his silence since they’d pulled Keith from the Red Lion screamed at them. “Did he know?” Shiro asked. He had always been closest to Keith. He had known Keith since before they’d been tossed into space. Lance wondered how much it hurt him to know that this was there in front of him all along. Lance wondered if Shiro had ever noticed a sign or something off that he didn’t read too much into, something that made it glaringly obvious, now.

Hindsight was twenty twenty.

Lance, too, wondered if there was anything  _ any _ of them had noticed. He wracked his memory for it, running through every instance that stood out. Keith didn’t sleep often. He was an aggressive fighter. He took a beating better than any of them. He had a high tolerance for pain. But those were Keith things more than they were Galra things. Maybe they were a bit of both, though. Lance bit his lip.

“I don’t think he knew,” Pidge murmured at last. “I never brought up what I’d found. I didn’t intend to come across it, and it felt like—like a violation of his privacy that I had seen it at all. But I don’t think he knew, no.”

None of them spoke. None of them wanted to speak because speaking meant acknowledging the truth. Keith was Galra,  _ part _ Galra, Keith had been piloting the Red Lion  _ for _ the Galra. “They did this to him,” Hunk said at last. “Whatever they did to him, they made him this way. Right?”

Coran looked uncertain. “I can’t really say,” he told them. None of them wanted to hear that. It was easier to imagine that Keith had been forced to do it. It was harder to imagine what they might have done to him to force him to do it.

“Either way, he was piloting the Red Lion for them,” Shiro whispered. His voice was strained and he sounded tired. Lance glanced his way and only then noticed what had been bothering him so much. Allura was absent. The look on Shiro’s face he hadn’t been able to read probably explained why.

Coran considered them all. His face was clouded, his eyes hesitant. “The scarring on his neck. It’s self inflicted.” He said it as if the knowledge might some how fill in the blanks. “It seems likely he tried to escape, perhaps.”

Shiro went pale. “He tried to escape,” he echoed. Lance knew he knew. If you could have called dying escaping, then certainly Keith had fought back in the only way he could. Lance felt ill and he knew Shiro probably felt worse. Shiro had been the Galra’s prisoner for almost a year. Keith, too, had been the same. Maybe. Maybe Shiro had considered escaping.

“He recognized me,” Lance told them at last, desperate to break the quiet that had fallen over them as they all mulled it over. “He said my name, he  _ knew _ who I was.”

Shiro looked his way. He was still ashen and he head his trembling in the way he curled his fists. Lance did the same sometimes. They all did.

“So what do we do?” Hunk asked.

Shiro swept his gaze from Lance to all of them. “We decide together. Unanimous.”

“Allura’s not here,” Pidge pointed out.

“She needs time,” Shiro told them. “She needs—” He sighed and dragged a hand through his hair. It had gotten messy, over the months. Most of them had stopped keeping up minor things beyond what was easy and necessary. Even Pidge’s hair had gotten long. She looked like the picture of the girl who stood with her brother. But she looked older and more worn, beaten down around the edges. “She doesn’t want to be a part of this decision. She said we’re to decide without her.”

Allura hated the Galra. They had destroyed everything she had ever held dear. The Red Lion had been her father’s and she made no secret of how much it destroyed her that the Galra had it. That Keith had been the pilot; she couldn’t be unbiased. Her answer would be at odds with theirs. She would likely be the only one.

Lance couldn’t blame her, though. She had every right to be angry. She had every right to remove herself from the situation.

“I say we let him out,” Pidge suggested. She was the first to propose something, anything. “What do you think we should do, Shiro?”

Shiro, their leader, now looked like Shiro, another ragged member of their team. He looked Lance’s way and Lance remembered what he had said. Shiro wanted him the leader if anything were to ever happen to him. Lance didn’t want it. Lance didn’t want to decide what to do, he wanted them to decide so he could just go along with it. “I think we should let him out, too,” Lance agreed. “I think we owe it to him to allow him to give us an explanation.” If he could give them one. Lance shuddered at how Keith had sounded when he had stuttered out his name, voice raw and unused.

Lance looked to Hunk and Hunk was already nodding. “You all know my answer.”

Lance’s eyes swung to Coran. “And you?”

He seemed to consider it, twirling his mustache. Whatever his answer, he would be speaking for both himself and for Allura. He had suffered no less than she had. Lance could see him debating it, the side of him that wanted to be angry at Keith and the side of him that had come to know Keith as a teammate, the side of him that knew things were not so black and white. “We let him out,” Coran said at last.

It was unanimous.

 

They waited.

Before, the small part of Lance that knew Keith was out there somewhere would not have hesitated. Reality painted a different picture. They all hesitated, because the reality was that they no longer knew what they would find when they woke him up. It had been a year. This would no longer be the Keith they knew. Lance was no longer the Lance that Keith had known, no more than Pidge or Hunk or Shiro were now.

Lance didn’t believe for a moment that he had piloted the Red Lion for the Galra willingly. None of them did. Even Allura could not have believed it, though only Shiro and Coran would have been able to know that for certain.

Lance didn’t believe it, though, and neither did the other paladins. That was what mattered at the moment.

None of them wanted to know what the Galra had done to him to force him into the Red Lion for them. That was the hardest to come to terms with. Lance slept fitfully that night, remembering Keith’s strangled cry when he had seen him.

Nothing good, they knew. Nothing they wanted to hear.

Shiro and Pidge were already there when Lance finally stomached showing up the next morning. Hunk wandered in barely a moment later, looking as tired as Lance felt. Coran stood in front of the pod, looking over a digital display that moved too fast for Lance to catch anything on it, but the Altean scrawl was familiar enough.

“No change from yesterday.” He glanced their way but it was news they had expected.

Shiro looked tired, more so than usual; Lance could tell just by looking at him that he hadn’t been with Allura that night. She helped him with his nightmares. He had never said as much directly but they all knew. He looked far from well rested. He stepped over to the pod, looking Keith over, his hand idly brushing over the glass.

He turned to look over the rest of them but his gaze lingered on Lance.

“Any last reservations?” he asked.

They were scattered about the room. Pidge sat where she had been the day before, legs dangling, one hand subtly on her bayard which lay next to her. Lance had his clipped to his belt, his own hand hovering over it. Shiro had his arm stiff in the way that spoke of the possibility of needing to use it.

None of them expected him to attack, but they would be stupid to be unprepared. They had spent the last year raiding Galra ships and Galra controlled planets. Being over prepared was a far cry from being under prepared. Keith would be outnumbered, either way.

Shiro let another tick go by and then he turned and pressed the pod release.

The pods were always cold. Lance had been in them often enough to recognize the faint chill that came over the room as it whooshed open, to understand the dizziness in Keith’s eyes as they slowly fluttered open. It was hard to read the eyes of a Galra, golden and pupil less as they were, but Lance had fought enough of them that he had started to learn how. Up close Lance could see the faint scarring around Keith’s temples, the splattering of a starburst scar creeping across his neck, gnarled and tinged stark white against his otherwise purple skin.

Idly, Lance reached up to drag a finger across his own scar. They were all scarred now, one way or another. Keith was scarred more. Keith had it worse. It wasn’t a proper comparison, to hold him against to what they had to go through. He had gone through his own thing. They had gone through theirs.

He didn’t move when the pod opened but he was unmistakably not there, his expression slack, his eyes glazed over. He stared out at them without a reaction, without so much as a word. Shiro looked on edge, he looked ready to panic. Lance felt a swear on the top of his tongue. He held it back.

The air, now cool from the pod, was tense and heavy.

It was finally Shiro that spoke. “Keith,” he whispered. His adam's apple bobbed as he swallowed. “Keith, say something,  _ please _ .”

No reaction. Lance swore this time. Pidge shifted behind him. He glanced at her and she had a white knuckle grip on the lip of the exam table. Her eyes were downcast.

Then Keith moved, stepping from the pod, stumbling. Shiro reached to catch him. It was the first reaction so far as he flinched away, arm coming up in front of him to block the contact. He didn’t tumble to the ground but he wavered for a moment, gathering his legs about him.

It was Hunk that tried again this time. “Keith?”

Nothing.

Behind him Pidge dropped from the table and stalked out. No one said a word about it, but Coran stepped forward, walking beside Keith, whose eye twitched at the sudden proximity of someone else near him. “Keith,” Coran said carefully. 

“Is it, is it mind control?” Hunk asked again. His eyes were dark. Lance remembered the scatter of skulls and bones and the desperate, terrible horror of it. “Is it—” He trailed off and he dragged a hand through his hair. It knocked his headband askew. He didn’t seem to care in the least.

“I’m not certain, but—” Coran waved a hand in front of his eyes slowly and Keith flinched slightly. Shiro caught Coran’s wrist, giving him a look. Coran stopped, dropping his arm back to his side. “Keith,” he said suddenly, his tone sharp. “Touch your nose.”

There was no hesitation. Keith lifted a hand and pressed a finger to his nose. The clawed tips of his hands were more noticeable than ever. Lance looked away for a moment until it passed, until Keith’s hand dropped again to his side.

“Suggestion,” Coran said at last, stepping away. “Not really mind control, but—”

“They told him to pilot the Red Lion so he did,” Shiro whispered.

Keith blinked, frowning. He looked hesitant where before there wasn’t a sign. “Do you want me to pilot the Red Lion?” he asked. He sounded pained. His hands shook by his side.

Hunk swore this time.

Shiro paled, exchanging a look with Coran. “No,” he said at last. “I—”

Keith’s face crumpled. It was worse, seeing him react. Lance suddenly wished for the blank expression from before. “What do you want me to do?” he asked. His voice trembled. When no one said anything, he fell silent.

Hunk stepped forward and again Keith looked his way, startled. He took a step back slowly. His legs wobbled. He didn’t speak again. “What do we do?” Hunk asked. He looked helpless. He looked as helpless as Shiro did, as Lance himself felt.

“Maybe I can speak to Allura?” Coran suggested. Shiro gave him a look that Lance missed from where he stood. It wasn’t a good one, from the way Coran frowned after.

“I can, uhh—” Lance began. Everyone looked his way. Even Coran. “My room is next to his, maybe I can— I can take him there, watch him, see if anything— I don’t know, maybe see if something triggers him back to himself, until we can figure something else out?”

“Will it?” Hunk asked Coran. Coran shook his head.

“He recognized me,” Lance told them. He was pretty sure he had told them before. “Maybe, I don’t know, maybe something else can snap him out of it?”

No one said that it might not work. Lance was growing more certain by the moment that it wouldn’t work. “We can go from there?” he finished. He shifted under the stares. The one from Keith was the worst.

“Sounds like a plan,” Shiro said after a tick. “I can talk to Allura in the meantime, we can figure something out.”

 

Keith followed Lance with no objection, not that he or anyone else expected one at that point.

Keith’s room, when they got to it, was as he had left it. Lance had only ever stepped into it once, since. It was spotless. The sheets of the bed turned down with the military precision that had been instilled into them in their time at the Garrison. His clothes were neatly tucked away on the shelving when Lance opened the panel, and he grabbed the first set he saw.

He pushed them into Keith’s hands and Keith looked at him for a long moment before turning and heading towards the bathroom. He remembered the layout of his room and a moment later the shower started up. Lance sat on the opposite bed, slumping back against the wall there.

Keith came out, eventually. He looked no less exhausted than he had before and his hair dripped water as he walked. The clothes he’d changed into hung awkwardly on his frame and it pronounced how thin he was, how much taller he had gotten. Lance wondered if it was a side effect of being part Galra, for such a spurt of growth to suddenly hit him. They were both passed the age for such a sudden shift in height.

Without the armor, he looked frail. His face was sunken in, rings around his eyes. His hands were bony and his fingers ended in points.

It was weird, to see him the way he was now. Galra. Or part Galra. The very thing they had been fighting for so long. Between that and what was there now, nothing there but an empty shell, it didn’t really feel like Keith.

Lance closed his eyes and took a deep breath, curling his hand into the bed sheets beneath him. When he opened them Keith was sat on the edge of his own bed, quiet, watching him as Lance watched him in return.

He jumped at a sudden knock on the door and he stood and stumbled over to the door. Keith didn’t move.

It was Hunk, bowl of food in hand. He looked shaken. It was Lance’s first time properly looking at him since they’d woken Keith and he looked ragged around the edges. His headband was missing and his hair was a mess. It had become a nervous habit of his, to mess at his hair the more anxious he got.

Judging by the way he looked back at Lance, Lance was certain he probably looked as rough. He stood aside and Hunk stepped in, casting a nervous glance Keith’s way. “Figured he needed to eat,” he explained, even though Lance didn’t need him to. “Has there been any change.”

It had been maybe an hour. Lance shook his head and Hunk walked over and held out the bowl. Keith took it, his hands almost eager in the way he clutched at it, but he set about it slowly.

Hunk watched for maybe a moment and then settled onto the opposite bed where Lance had previously been. He stepped over and joined him, bumping his shoulder against Hunk’s. Hunk was the kind of person who felt right to be near. He was inviting in his posture and Lance was thankful for the company.

“Do you think he can hear us?” Hunk asked. “Do you think he even realizes he’s here, with us?”

Lance shrugged. “Not a clue,” he said. “But he responds to—” He hesitated. He was loathe to use the word but it seemed the only word that fit. “He responds to commands, so he  _ hears _ us, but I don’t know if he really takes in anything else.”

They fell silent and Lance slouched further against Hunk who didn’t object. “Where did Pidge go?” Lance asked at last. He had barely seen her rush out.

Hunk glanced his way. “She’s in the hangar. She, uhh—” He licked his lips. “She’s not reacting very well, to all of this.”

It wasn’t really like her. She talked to them about her problems. She was comfortable reaching out, when she needed it.

“I think she blames herself,” Hunk explained at last. “She didn’t find him sooner and it’s eating at her.”

Maybe if Pidge had found him sooner, then Keith wouldn’t be the way he was now. Lance didn’t blame her, though. He had spent sleepless nights pouring through the logs with her. He should have noticed as well.

“Maybe we’re all to blame,” Lance said at last. “We could have tried harder, maybe.”

Hunk shook his head. “I don’t think we really could have. We didn’t so much as have a place to start.” The Galra had taken special care to ensure no news of the Red Lion had reached them. It was only by a fluke of luck that Pidge had finally come across it. Maybe they should have had a fluke of luck earlier. Maybe a full on approach, rather than the guerilla tactics, would have brought them closer to him.

Hunk left, at last, taking the empty bowl with him. Lance realized, once he had left, that he himself hadn’t eaten yet, either. Hunk maybe hadn’t thought it through. Maybe Hunk was skipping breakfast, as well.

It was awkward, from there. Keith staring at him but not really seeing him. Lance feeling sick beneath his gaze, every subtle movement from him a reminder that this wasn’t really Keith anymore. He tried not to think about whether or not they could get their Keith back. Maybe. Maybe not.

But he was Keith. He was the final piece that made their team whole. He was the gaping gap between them all that they rarely spoke about, the longer it had been since he’d gone missing. Lance felt guilty, now, knowing that he had been a part of that.

“Keith,” Lance murmured at last. He thought back to what Hunk had said. Maybe he could hear them. Maybe he knew, to some extent, that he was in his own room, that Lance was sat across from him. Maybe he was trapped behind it all, desperate to react but unable to. “Talk to me,” Lance pleaded.

He didn’t say a word. Lance wasn’t sure why he thought it would work. He had barely spoken when Shiro had begged it of him, either. Lance knocked his head back against the wall, frustrated. 

So he talked, instead, just to fill the silence. There was too much he had wanted to say to Keith that he had never gotten the chance to say.

He grieved in regret.

“It sucked here, without you,” Lance told him at last. His voice was surprisingly bitter. “We thought you were dead.” Lance thought back to the sullen looks Shiro and Pidge and Hunk had all given him when they’d first found him.  _ We thought you were dead _ , they had told him. They had thought Keith was dead. Lance suddenly understood those looks. He wondered for the first time what their regrets had been, thinking him dead.

“You’re an idiot, you know that?” Lance continued. It was from a place of annoyance, as if spelling it out might snap him from it. As if falling back into their routine might make it seem normal. There was nothing from Keith. “You’re an idiot and I—” Lance bit his lip. “I liked you. Like, I really really liked you.”

He hated to admit it to him, like this. But like this was all they may ever have of him. He’d spent nearly a year full of regrets and words he’d always wished he’d said to him. It all spilled out of him. It burst like a dam.

“And you were a great paladin, Keith,” Lance whispered. “You were the best of all of us. You were reckless and you were stupid, but you were the best.” Keith only stared back, silent, eyes unseeing. Lance droned onwards with no real direction to what he was saying. “It  _ sucked _ without you. We worried all the time, and—” He stopped mid word, eyes wide. At some point Keith had gone from looking across to him to looking  _ at _ him. It was a subtle shift but it was there and it was  _ something _ . “Keith?” Lance tried.

Nothing, but Keith’s eyes were still on him. Maybe Keith  _ could  _ hear him. Maybe he couldn’t. “I got stuck on a planet with dinosaurs,” Lance continued at last. He laughed. “It was awesome. You would’ve found it  _ great _ .” If Keith heard him, Lance wondered if he would hear the obvious sarcasm. “I almost died.” He had never really admitted it out loud, even to the others, even after they’d sauntered through each other’s minds. “I had a lot of close calls.”

It suddenly didn’t matter if Keith could hear him. It only mattered that he had someone to talk to, someone who had been removed from it all. “I nearly starved and then I nearly drowned and then I nearly got mauled to death. I nearly got mauled to death a lot.” He grinned. It was manic. His fingers tapped nervously against the blankets of the bed. “Who am I kidding, though. You had it worse. I was there a month. You were there, what, months?” Maybe the whole time. None of them really knew. Maybe he had ended up there from day one. Or maybe the Galra had come across him, later.

To Lance it felt like forever ago, now, that they had pulled him from that dust covered, wretched planet, and he had thought _ , I would take a Galra ship over this _ . Keith didn’t have that luxury. Keith had gotten a Galra ship from the start.

Keith, still, didn’t say anything.

Lance sighed and closed his eyes, letting his head fall back against the wall again.

 

He woke with a jolt sometime later to find Keith gone. Lance stumbled to his feet before he was even properly awake, nearly tumbling to the ground as his feet were caught in the blankets.

“Fuck,” he breathed out, pressing his palms to his eyes. “ _ Fuck _ .”

It was something like midday, maybe, so even in his panic the rational part of him said that Keith couldn’t have made it very far without running into at least one of others. The less rational part thought maybe he had managed to walk out of an airlock or he’d wandered off into one of the ship’s lower floors where they had barely a chance in hell of finding him, given the veritable maze those parts of the ship were.

Maybe he had taken off in the Red Lion?

The thought plagued him as he scoured the bridge, where Coran gave him a puzzled look, and then the training deck, where he found Shiro with his arm through a gladiator. Shiro stopped what he was doing when he skidded in, the gladiator bursting into dust around him.

Lance didn’t wait for him to ask the question he knew Shiro had opened his mouth to ask. “I lost him,” he blurted out. “Shit, I’m sorry, I fell asleep and—”

Shiro stepped over. “It’s fine. He can’t have gotten far.”

“I checked the bridge already.”

Shiro considered for a moment. “The kitchen?”

Lance nodded.

“The hangar?”  
Lance swallowed. Shiro had been thinking along the same lines as him, it seemed. “I was heading there next,” Lance told him.

 

Keith was there, when they got there, seated on the floor with his back against the leg of the Red Lion. He was almost slumped there, one hand pressed against the cool floor, his head fallen back, dead eyes on the beams and pipes high above the hangar.

Pidge sat across from him, legs crossed, a troubled expression on her face, and she was speaking to him softly. She stopped, though, the moment Lance and Shiro stepped in, but Lance could tell by her startled looked that they had likely just walked in on some sort of one sided heart to heart.

She blamed herself.

Shiro relaxed where he stood next to him, tension falling away from his shoulders that Lance hadn’t noticed until it dropped away. “How long has he been here?” 

Pidge shifted so that she was looking their way, fumbling with her glasses. “Not too long. He hasn’t said anything.” She bit her lip, glancing at Keith. He was looking at them now. It was unnerving. “He just came in and sat there.”

“Have you talked to Allura yet?” Lance asked quietly, directing his attention back to Shiro.

Shiro nodded slowly, eyes still on Keith. He was moving, now, dragging himself carefully to his feet and wobbling only a bit. But he moved with purpose and he turned around to press a hand to the metal of the Red Lion. “Yeah,” Shiro said, stepping towards Keith. “She was, uhh—” He drew to a slow stop, eyes narrowing.

Keith was mumbling something, a low, monotone drone whose words couldn’t quite be made out from where they stood. Pidge, though, was closer, and she stumbled to her feet, a hand to her mouth. She looked their way, eyes watery, and mouthed something. It was drowned out as Keith finally spoke up.

“She’s screaming,” he said, turning to look at him, hand still against Red, fingers curled against the metal. “She’s always screaming.” Wetness streaked his cheeks, shiny against purple skin under bright white lights. He was crying, Lance realized. “It  _ hurts _ .”

Beside Lance, Shiro moved, a hurried motion that startled him and forced his eyes away from Keith. He didn’t move towards him though. “Wait,” Lance said, catching his wrist as he turned to leave. “Where are you going, what are—”

“I’m going to get Allura,” he said. Lance let go of his wrist and he disappeared from the room. It left him and Pidge alone with Keith, who had a hand clutched at his temple, now, legs looking as if they might give out beneath him at any moment.

Pidge was there when he finally fell, catching him though only barely, falling to the ground with him, one of his arms draped awkwardly around her shoulder. “I’m—” She looked from Keith to Lance. “I’m not sure what to do, what do we—”

Lance dropped down in front of them both, cursing Shiro and cursing the entire situation. “Keith,” he said carefully, and Keith lifted his head, palm still pressed to his temple. He’d slid back against the Red Lion once more and now Pidge knelt beside him, hands on her knees, curling and uncurling her fingers, fidgeting. “Do you, uhh—” Lance licked his lips, catching Pidge’s eyes. “Do you know where you are, Keith?”

Keith looked at him and something flickered in the yellow of his eyes. He looked away just as quickly, eyes darting past him. Lance chanced a quick look, thinking it perhaps Shiro and Allura, but no one had stepped in. “I’m on the Castle of Lions,” Keith said at last. It was a statement of fact more than it was a statement of understanding. He knew where he was but he didn’t know why.

Lance searched his face anyway, though, for anything that told him  _ Keith _ was there, their Keith and not the shell of Keith that had come out of the healing pod. This was the most visceral reaction they had gotten from him so far and now Lance wanted to push, feeling suddenly on the verge of what may have been a breakthrough. “Do you know who you are?” Lance asked at last.

His eyes went wide and he pulled away, putting as much distance as he could between Lance and Pidge and himself. His back thumped against the Red Lion and he shuddered. He didn’t answer the question though.

Lance pushed. “Do you know—”

“I’m home?” Keith finally croaked out. He lifted tearful eyes to Lance.

Lance nodded, reaching for him. He didn’t flinch away this time. Instead he relaxed, melted back against Red. He let out a sound that might have been a sigh and his eyelids fluttering closed.

“Yeah. You’re home.”


	4. Chapter 4

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> I love you all so here's the rest of the fic~ One more chapter after this!

It didn’t last, of course.

 

Lance didn’t sleep the rest of the night, eyes on Keith. Keith never slept either, eyes on Lance. It killed him. Lance wanted to go over and shake him until the Keith from earlier in the night came back. But that Keith had looked afraid.

Lance didn’t really know what was easier to handle.

 

“Did they even feed you?” Lance asked as he dropped a bowl in front of Keith. He been told to sit, which seemed to be the only time they could get him to do hardly anything. He had to be told. It turned Lance’s stomach, to think that they had reduced him to that. He had probably just been told to pilot the Red Lion and done it without question. 

Hunk looked him like he was crazy where he sat. Lance dropped down into the chair next to him, situating himself across from Keith. Keith didn’t touch his food. He exchanged a glance with the others. Shiro was still pale. He had been pale since they’d gotten Keith back.

Pidge looked away.

Lance swallowed. “Eat,” he said. He hated it. He hated that he had to tell him to do anything. Keith glanced his way and then down to the bowl and fumbled to pick up the spoon in it. His hand trembled.

“Fuck,” Lance breathed out, pressing his palms to his eyes. “ _ Fuck _ .”

Pidge stared at him. She was the swearer amongst them and she looked like she wanted to swear herself. “What did they do to him?” she asked. Shiro looked away from them both. Likely he could imagine what they might have done.

But they all looked his way for an answer that they knew he didn’t want to give. They all had things they didn’t want to do. They did those things anyway. They mostly talked about what was bothering them. They communicated. Shiro had always been the most difficult to pick away at.

He sighed. He’d barely touched his food. “I don’t know what they did—”

“No, but you have an idea of what they did,” Hunk cut in. Hunk wasn’t having it.

“They experimented on me only a bit,” Shiro said at last. “They only took my arm because—” Lance tensed, glancing over at Keith. Keith was eating but he every few ticks he stopped and looked over at them. Maybe he could hear them. Shiro had noticed as well. He cleared his throat. “Anyway, they probably tortured him. I don’t really know. Maybe Haggar got to him, or—”

At the mention of the name Keith froze, eyes wide, something there that hadn’t been before. He shook enough he dropped his spoon. “Don’t take me to Haggar,” he whispered.

It was subtle, the kind of thing you wouldn’t notice unless you were looking for it. They were all looking for it. They were looking for any sign that Keith was even aware the world around him existed, and that was it.

That was the sign.

Allura, where she sat at the other end of the table, stood, chair scraping loud along the floor. Shiro had disappeared with her the night before, after Keith had shut down once again and Lance had hauled him off to his room. And the way she looked at Keith told him they’d had a fruitful conversation on the matter. She looked sad, where before she had looked fearful and angry.

Keith flinched away from her when she neared him, but she didn’t stop until she had curled a hand into his hair, pulling it aside to look over the scarring there. He shook and curled his fingers, white knuckled, along the edge of the table.

 

“I had wondered why the Red Lion allowed this,” Allura began, once she’d seen whatever it was she had wanted to see. She’d collected herself again, only insofar as she had placed a thin veil over the horror buried into her gut. Lance knew because it was the very same horror that was burrowing deep into himself. “The Lions are sentient, to some extent, as you are all aware,” they nodded, “And even in the hands of the Galra, they would fight back against any control over them by such evil.”

They all knew the Black Lion had been an exception. Lance, and likely all of them, had assumed that the Red Lion had ceded the power as well, allowed it through her connection to Keith.

Allura didn’t sit back down. She stood, worrying her lip between her teeth, casting an occasional look to where Keith sat. She took a slow breath and continued. “The Red Lion, as we all know, is the most, how do you say, temperamental of them all?”

Hunk made a face and Lance managed a small grin. Temperamental was an understatement. Just like. Just like Keith had been. His grin fell away.

“They could not have hoped to find another pilot,” Allura said at last. “And they could not have hoped to bend her to their will, so they didn’t.” She gestured to Keith and Keith seemed to notice, then, where all of her previous glances had rolled off of him. He tensed, wide eyes meeting hers briefly. “They’ve manipulated his quintessence.”

She let the statement speak for itself and it spoke loud in the ensuing silence. Lance chanced a glance at Shiro and he was looking at Keith, mouth pressed into a thin line. Shiro knew better than any of them.

“They’ve altered his thought pattern, stripped it down to only what they needed to make him follow their orders,” Shiro said. Shiro  _ knew _ and it turned Lance’s stomach. Shiro didn’t remember much of his time with the Galra. Lance had always chalked it up to trauma, which was a reasonable conclusion, but perhaps there was more. Maybe Shiro knew because he had experienced it himself first hand.

“Can you fix it?” Pidge asked quietly, an echo of before. “Can you  _ undo  _ it?”

One by one they all turned their gazes back onto her.

Allura had a powerful presence. When she stood at the head of any room she commanded the attention of everyone present and she stood taller for every pair of eyes on her. She had been a princess, once upon a time. She was a princess, still, but she had no one left to be a princess to, save Coran and the rest of them.

Now, though, she was hardly a princess and she only seemed to reel back from every look fixed fast upon her. She refused to meet anyone’s eyes. “Maybe,” she told them. She sounded hard pushed to say it. She said it for how many eyes were on her pleading her to say it. “ _ Maybe _ , but it’s not so simple as—” She bit at a thumbnail and it was alarming to see her fidget. “It’s not so simple as  _ undoing _ it, but I can fix it, to an extent.” She didn’t look so happy as the rest of them at the prospect.

“What’s the cost?” Hunk asked. “There’s a cost, right? A downside.”

Of course there would be a downside. If undoing it were so simple—

Allura looked at them all, eyes tired. She looked almost like a mother and as humorous as it had been for them to think of her as such it was anything but, now. She was beat down around the edges and she’d shown it the least of all of them, for sake of shouldering the burden. It had begun with Shiro, until he had tumbled down to where Allura was now. He was run ragged. He needed them sometimes more than they needed him. There was no weakness in that, but it brought him down from that pedestal all the same.

Allura was falling down after him.

“I don’t know,” she said at last. “What they’ve done, it’s bled over into Red, through their connection. They control him, they control her. They control him and  _ he _ can control her. The lines are  _ blurred _ .”

“I don’t understand,” Lance admitted. He tried to remember the pinched look on Keith’s face as he’d stood in the shadow of the Red Lion. He thought of how Blue purred beneath his hands and sometimes whispered into him. Not in words but in a feeling she rolled into his mind. Red was screaming, Keith had told them. Lance wondered what it would sound like to have Blue scream into his mind. It would hurt, he decided. It would make him ill.

Keith sat still, face blank. Lance wondered if he could hear Red screaming even now.

“She might be why he’s alive now,” Allura clarified. She didn’t seem satisfied with her own answer though and continued quickly. “I’m not sure if what I can do for him will do anything. It might kill him.”

It hurt Lance as much as it should have. Guilt settled into him. They had thought Keith dead for so long, only to get him back without really having him back at all. He wasn’t really  _ alive _ .

“Can he hear us?” Hunk asked suddenly.

Allura frowned. “Of course, he’s  _ there _ , underneath it all.”

“So he can hear us, just talking about—” Lance met Hunk’s eyes across the table and his heart sank. Keith knew they were talking about him. Keith knew they were talking about how he might die as if it was nothing.

The guilt felt heavier.

“It needs to be unanimous,” Shiro said. His voice was scratchy. “We can’t just—” His eyes were wide and they fell on Keith. Keith’s own gaze had dropped to the table, his expression pinched. That was it, that was how he had looked as he had pressed a hand to Red.

Was it fair to him, for them to  _ vote _ on helping him as if it were a democratic process up for debate? “No,” Lance said. The room fell silent and even the steady hum of the ship seemed to fade into the background. “It should be one of us. Only one of us.” He eyes fell on Shiro and Shiro sagged beneath his gaze. Lance, though, didn’t get a chance to say it.

“It should be you,” Hunk said. His voice was sharp in the silence. “You knew him longer than any of us.”

Lance had never really known Keith before, not like Shiro had. They’d had a few classes together, when Lance had been a sophomore and Keith had been a junior. He always sat in the front row and Lance always sat directly behind him because he found Keith intimidating to look at but he  _ also _ wanted to be close to the front. Behind him, Keith would be less likely to notice him and Lance wouldn’t feel the need to shrink beneath his gaze.

It didn’t matter anyway, though, because Keith had never noticed him at all and Lance didn’t remember Keith for those times he sat behind him, when he was teacher's pet and a bit of a know it all, as much as the accusation now would have sent him steaming. No, Lance remembered Keith for the sudden downward spiral he’d taken after they’d heard the news about the Kerberos crew.

Lance remembered the class they shared together and how he  _ wasn’t _ there and how tired he looked the times he did show, how messy his hair had been and how scratchy his writing was as he only barely managed to scrawl notes down from their lecture, his hand shaking.

Lance had only ever spotted Keith and Shiro together once. He had been returning from a field course and he caught sight of them as he jogged the stairs back to the main campus. They were sitting off on a dune, laughing, hair fluttering in the harsh desert wind. Lance had never seen Keith laugh before. He never saw Keith laugh after.

Grief did terrible things to people.

(Lance knew, now, because they had all spent a year thinking Keith dead.)

Shiro dropped a hand down onto the table and he drummed his fingers across the surface and it set the mood for the building tension. The tension never snapped and he finally stopped. “He would want it,” Shiro told them at last. He looked at Keith and he looked sad. “He’d want us to help him, even if—”

Shiro looked at Allura and there was more than Lance could understand in that look. Fondness, sadness, fear. Allura might kill Keith, the closest thing to a brother Shiro had ever had. They had all lost Keith once already. They might lose him again. But they hadn’t really gotten him back to begin with so could it really be considered losing him?

Maybe. Maybe to Shiro it would be all the harder. Shiro had been the strongest of all of them in the wake of Keith’s absence in their lives. He’d lost a lot. Grief got easier, over time. Eventually it faded and all that was left was resignation.

“Let’s do it,” Shiro said and that was that. He’d made his choice, for himself and for the rest of them and for Keith. No one objected.

 

It was too easy to get him where they needed him and with a quiet horror Allura directed him to lay across the exam table. Lance imagined it was a familiar direction because Keith’s eyes were wild where he lay, his hands shaking but pressed flat against the smooth, cold metal. Allura hovered about his head, wringing her hands, steadying her breathing. It would be akin to what she’d done to the Balmera, she had told them, and both Shiro and Coran stood near her should she need them.

Pidge fidgeted near the glowing display for the healing pod, tooling about with it with no real purpose. Lance wondered if she’d been doing the same when she’d stumbled across all their DNA signatures. He wondered what else was stored in the system there; how many of their injuries were catalogued in gruesome detail there?

“We need to restrain him,” Allura said at last. She reached out and ran a hand over Keith’s forehead, gently sweeping his hair back. It was long and it fell into his face where he lay. Allura was soothing with the gesture and where it might have been calming to anyone else it only set Keith more on edge. His eyes flickered up to hers and tears leaked from his eyes, running down his face and into his hair.

“Please,” he rasped out. “Please don’t do this,  _ please _ .”

Lance looked away, sick, and it was Pidge that moved to find restraints and finally stepped over. Keith flinched as she caught his wrist gently and her hands shook as she dropped the cuffs onto them and secured him to the table with a small touch. Keith started struggling in earnest the moment they closed around him and Pidge jerked away as if burned.

Allura’s hands were shaking, too, as she finally moved to press her fingers to Keith’s temples. Her fingers circled the scars there and Lance swallowed. “Quintessence burns,” she explained softly, noticing his gaze. Her own eyes flickered to Shiro and Shiro ran his fingers across the scar bridging his nose. Then Allura swept her eyes across the rest of them. “None of you need to stay for this,” she whispered. She looked like she wanted to be there least of all of them but she remained where she was. She licked her lips and looked down until she met Keith’s wide, watery eyes. He was whispering something that Lance couldn’t make out but his mouth moved as he stuttered something. “This will be painful for him.”

Pidge shook her head. Hunk and Shiro shook their heads. Lance took a deep breath and shook his as well. “We’ll stay,” he said. His throat was suddenly tight and he swallowed. Allura passed one last sweeping glance at them and then she gave a curt nod and drew in a ragged breath.

Lance knew the moment she started, not because of the steady smell of ozone that dropped into the room or the faint buzz of static working through him, but because Keith screamed. He screamed a tortured and broken scream and between every few breathes he begged, tears streaking his face and down into his hair. He choked on every breath, his chest heaving, and he thrashed violently, back arching, struggling against the cuffs keeping him down.

Allura was bent over him, hands a steady blue glow and her eyes squeezed closed to the onslaught of his pain and thrashing. It was hard to watch and harder to listen to. Lance could look away or close his eyes to it but he couldn’t block out his screams. Lance was frozen where he stood, though, and he had to force himself to look anywhere but where his friend lay screaming.

His eyes found Pidge, who had dropped down to the floor in front of the healing pod, back against it, and Hunk, who sat nearby. Lance could barely stomach staying on his feet and even without the screaming, the static buzz of Allura’s quintessence made it difficult to keep his legs under him. It was a wall of power and energy and it was dizzying. It made him lightheaded and gave the entire room the stomach dropping feel of free fall.

Shiro, too, was on the ground, his back against the wall and Lance looked his way and a flurry of panic sunk into him. Shiro, of course, had his own reason for his terror and he sat with his hands tangled in his hair and his head tilted down, eyes fixed on the floor. Of course,  _ of course _ , and Lance’s breath caught in his throat and he stumbled over to him and slid down to the floor next to him. Shiro gave him a shaky look and dropped a hand down and Lance caught it. And they clung to each other like that because that was what they had, in that moment. They had each other and Pidge and Hunk were nearby and they had each other, and Keith had no one.

Keith had had no one.

Then everything stopped. The screams had become burned into him and they echoed in his ears so much so that Lance only noticed from the sudden absence of a tremor in the air that it had all come to an abrupt halt. He lifted his head and Keith was no longer moving and the rise and fall of his chest was no longer there and—

Lance stumbled to his feet, Shiro barely managing to follow him. Allura was teetering where she stood and Coran was hovering about her, ready to catch her. “Pod,” she gasped out, gesturing wildly to it before bringing a hand up to her head, mirroring the motion Keith had before been making so often, a palm pressed hard against her temple.

There was too much movement, then, but they all moved as a cohesive unit. Pidge yanked the cuffs off and Hunk hauled Keith off the table and it was Shiro who helped him get him into the pod. Lance helped get the door closed and then faint blue light spilled over Keith’s face as it clicked on.

 

They took turns spending as much of the next few days in front of the healing pod as they could. It was cathartic, to be alone with him, even in stasis as he was. He was still as death, which was oddly fitting, and the sickly blue glow of the healing pod only made the metaphor more real. He was Galra, but it faded out, slowly, as the days wore on. It was subtle enough that it went unnoticed until maybe three days after, when Lance stepped in and found Pidge in front of the pod, legs crossed.

“His skin is less purple,” she noted and Lance frowned and studied Keith hard and maybe noticed it as well. More so, he noticed the way his fingers no longer ended in sharp points, his ears less noticeable beneath his messy crown of hair. It hadn’t been cut once, from the looks of it. Time still went by and they still changed. Keith wasn’t immune.

Lance joined Pidge on the floor, sitting as she was, and she slumped softly against him, dropping her head onto her shoulder. She was getting tall and where once it may have been an awkward angle it was now comfortable and easy. 

A thought came to Lance, suddenly, as he gazed up at Keith.“What if he doesn’t wake up?” he asked.

Pidge shrugged. Lance could feel the motion rolling through her neck and against his shoulder.

“Maybe—” Lance swallowed, “Allura said it might not work, she said it could kill him—”

Pidge shrugged again and then slid away from him and back upright. “Maybe she melted his brain,” she said and Lance choked on a breath and she sent him an awkward grin. “I’m sure he’s fine,” Pidge reassured him. “He’s been through worse, clearly.” She was lying to herself and to him to make it better. They’d done a lot of that, over the last year, despite swearing off secrets. Sometimes lies were necessary.

  
  


It was five days in total and each of them were more nerve wracking than the last. Allura, when Lance saw her, which was rare, had this distant, pained look in her eyes that made his stomach uneasy. At times she had the same glossed over, dead eyed look that Keith had previously had, but whenever she noticed one of them staring at her she shook it off but didn’t bother with even a fake smile to reassure them. Something had happened, in the time between her fingers first touching Keith’s temples and her fingers leaving them.

Shiro knew. Lance knew he knew from the small, lingering touches he gave her. She went out of her way to avoid them and Lance never once found her by the healing pod.

But it was five days, and after those five days they congregated in front of the pod. Pidge climbed into her now usual spot and Hunk was next to her, leaning against the table. Shiro was in front of the pod, eyes on Keith, and Lance had taken up a position just left of him, rocking from one foot to another, anxious.

Coran and Allura were both absent, and Shiro had quietly told Lance, on their way in, that they wanted them to have the moment alone. Allura, though, had assured Shiro that she was hopeful about the situation. But they both wanted to leave them to their privacy.

They all exchanged skittish glances and then Shiro pressed the button. There was no hesitation because they had all agreed beforehand.

Shiro was the most anxious of all of them, rolling on the balls of his feet, hands curling and uncurling by his sides. He’d spent much of the last few days with Allura and Lance wondered what she had told him that she hadn’t told the rest of them. He knew more than them or perhaps his own period of torture at the hands of the Galra was setting him on edge to finally face Keith.

Slowly the pod whirred open and Keith’s eyes fluttered open and they were indeed normal, blue with a subtle sweep of purple in them. His paler skin made the scars along his temple stand out harsher and angrier and Lance pointedly directed his gaze away from them and to Keith himself. He looked dazed, still, and Lance’s heart skipped a beat as he though  _ it didn’t work _ , but then he blinked and something else settled in them instead.

“Shiro?” Keith managed, eyes swiveling to him where he stood in front of him. They were confused for a long moment but then Keith’s face cracked and he pitched forward, legs giving out. Shiro caught him, all deadweight and wiry limbs, and dropped to the floor with him and Keith sat there on his knees, legs sprawled out around him, breath coming in panicked gasps, body shaking. Keith was murmuring something to him that none of them could quite hear but it didn't seem to help and he only reached a hand up to clutch at his head, palm against his temple, nails pressed into his skull

“Talk to me, Keith,” Shiro finally said, his own voice cracking. He glanced behind him at the rest of them, something terrified in his eyes, and Lance pushed forward towards them.

Lance dropped down next to them, exchanging a quick look with Shiro. “Keith?” he breathed, hesitant. Keith shifted and raised his head to meet his eyes.

“I'm here,” Keith said. “I'm—I'm here.” He didn’t look like he believed it himself. He looked down at his own hands and they shook but they were no longer purple or clawed. Then his face crumpled as the realization dawned on him. He reached out and clung to Shiro’s arm, eyes wide. “I’m sorry,” he said, voice cracking. “I’m sorry, I’m—I didn’t want—” The words were lost to a sob and Keith pressed a hand to his mouth, hiding them behind it. He didn’t look at any of them and a curtain of his messy hair fell across his face, hiding him from them.


	5. Chapter 5

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> woops, so this isn't the last chapter afterall. There's one more after this, and then there will be a side-fic posted from Keith's pov. So if you're interested in that, be sure to subscribe to the series :)

They milled about, because it was easier to do that then to do anything else and pretend as if they actually cared about doing it. There wasn’t much to do on the ship, between training and eating and sleeping. It was the action that got them by, however hard it was. It passed the time fast and the fallout from it passed the time even faster. Pidge would have data to pour over and Lance would help her. Hunk would dig through the Lions, working out kinks and troubleshooting crazy ideas he had for them.

Now the passing time was torture. They sat in the lounge. None of them talked. Lance laid himself across one sofa, stealing it mostly for himself, and sprawled against Hunk. Pidge sat on the floor nearby, typing away at her laptop as if she were doing something. The silence was painful. The broken look on Keith’s face haunted them.

They’d left him with Shiro, who had the best experience, who perhaps understood what Keith had gone through better than any of them. It wouldn’t have done to overwhelm him and so that had all trickled out.

At some point Lance fell asleep, because he woke abruptly when Hunk moved beside him. He felt only half-alive, between too many sleepless nights and too much worry. He dragged himself upright, taking slow breaths to ease the dizziness of moving so fast. The world spun for half a moment and then Shiro came into focus as he stepped quietly into the room.

 

“He’s with Allura,” he told them when he saw their questioning looks. “I wasn’t comfortable leaving him alone.” Lance couldn’t say he disagreed with that. Shiro was pale, and he dropped onto the nearest sofa, pressing his palms to his eyes for a long moment before finally looking them all over.

“Is he okay?” Pidge asked quietly.

“He says he doesn’t remember anything,” Shiro said. It wasn’t really an answer but it was better than nothing. Whether or not he was okay could be inferred from it.

“He’s lying, isn’t he?” Hunk asked.

Shiro nodded. “Yeah, he is.”

There was silence then. There were too many questions for them to ask. Lance bit his tongue. Shiro was looking at them and he was trying to decide what to say, formulating his thoughts. He was worn, but he hid it beneath a thin veil of composure.

“He needs time,” Shiro said at last. “Allura and I will take turns with him, for a few days. We’ll go from there, I guess.”

“Allura, though?” Pidge asked.

Shiro bit his lip. “When she, uhh—” He looked away. “She knows what they did to him, she saw it.” Oh,  _ oh _ . Shiro looked as if he had said too much. “She won’t tell me, but—” They all knew what the ‘but’ indicated.

Allura had been shaking and pale, when they had seen her over the last few days. Lance had assumed it was a side effect of what she’d done to help Keith. It was, in some way. But not completely.

They would go from there.

 

It was two days before they had any real word. Shiro came down to what was probably breakfast, Lance wasn’t sure. Time was hard, with how little they slept, with how likely their schedules were to be turned sideways. But it was a shared meal time and he came down looking tired and slumped in his seat.

“One of us can take over,” Hunk said at last. Most of them were already barely eating, their nerves squashing any hunger they had. Shiro didn’t touch the bowl of food he had just prepared.

“He won’t eat,” Shiro said after a moment, looking at Hunk. “And he won’t sleep—All he wants is the be left alone.” And Shiro had finally left him alone, it seemed.

Did any of them really know what to do? Shiro had had no one, but Shiro had had large blanks in his memory and he had been thrown so far back into it all that he had never really had the time to recover. He had just recovered through sheer lack of timing to do so.

He hadn’t  _ really _ recovered, but he coped.

Hunk stood, grabbing up Shiro’s untouched bowl. “I’ll go up, see if I can get him to eat.” Shiro didn’t say a word to stop him and Hunk disappeared.

It left the room in awkward silence, just the three of them staring, tired, down at their food. Lance clinked his spoon against the side of his bowl, filling the room with the soft rhythm of metal against ceramic. Pigde kicked him after a moment, once it had become such a nuisance that even she was pushed to frustration. He stopped and took a deep breath and looked at Shiro.

He’d gotten another bowl of food but he hadn’t touched it.

“My room is next to his, you know,” Lance said. Shiro looked at him, confused.

“I know?” he said but he said it as he might say a question.

“We share a wall,” Lance supplied and Shiro sighed.

“I can take him to my room, if he’s keeping you up—” Lance shook his head, stopping him. He’d been kept up, yeah, by an occasional strangled cry; an angry voice as Keith spoke to Shiro; once by a loud thud, the result of something thrown. Some of the times Shiro was there, some of the times he wasn’t.

“I probably wouldn’t be sleeping, either way. But I can hang around tonight, so you can sleep.” Shiro considered it. “I mean, I’m sure he doesn’t really want to see any of us, but it has to happen at some point, right?”

Hunk hadn’t returned, and Lance took it as a sign that maybe Keith had let him in, had finally faced someone other than Shiro and an increasingly worn Allura. And maybe Hunk had gotten him to eat.

Lance didn’t linger in the kitchen long enough to see if he returned with an empty bowl, but he could hope, at the very least.

“Okay,” Shiro said at last, as Lance stood. “Yeah, just--Let me know, if you need something, if  _ he _ needs something.”

Lance nodded.

 

Maybe it was Hunk’s visit, or maybe it was something else, but Keith came down the next morning and they all tried their best not to stare as he stepped in. He stood in the doorway for a long moment, sweeping his gaze over them and for a tick Lance thought he would bolt away. He didn’t.

Shiro started to stand but Keith gave him a look that might have been withering. “I can get my own food,” he said. His voice cracked and he sounded as if he wanted to snap it out but didn’t have it in him. None of them said a word and he filled his own bowl and dropped down into the empty chair. It was subtle, the way he moved it as he sat, to pull it as far away from everyone as possible. Only so much so that it wasn’t obvious.

Lance noticed. He was sure the others noticed.

Keith started on his food without a word and the robotic motion with which he ate reminded Lance of the Keith before, who had sat in the very same place and eaten with a blank expression. His expression was anything but blank, now. His hand shook around his spoon and his eyes were fixed on the green goo as if it were the only thing in the universe that existed. Lance looked away.

All previous conversation had halted and an awkward silence fell over them. Hunk had been talking a quiet Pidge through his next project, an upgrade to the Yellow Lion that he hoped would make her faster. Shiro had been talking to Allura in a quiet voice, not about Keith but about the Red Lion. Lance hadn’t been following what they were saying, he had been engaged in an excited discussion with Coran about the languages on Earth.

It had all stopped the moment Keith appeared in the doorway. He was halfway through his bowl of food when he finally looked up, almost scowling. “Don’t stop everything on my behalf,” he said. “ _ Please _ .” It was said as a request but he sounded almost pleading.

Carefully, Hunk turned back to the paper he had out and the sketch he had been drawing on it, of what looked to be the back legs of Yellow. Pidge, though, only half listened to him, her eyes going to Keith every so often.

Allura and Shiro didn’t resume the conversation about the Red Lion, but they pulled Coran in as they began to talk about the ship itself, how it was holding up after their last battle. Their last battle being their suicide mission to grab up the Red Lion. They carefully left that out of the conversation.

It left only him. Lance tried not to stare at Keith but he couldn’t help it. It was the first he had seen of him since he’d left the pod, and he looked only a bit better than Lance had expected. Gone was the haunted look, but in it’s place was fatigue and anxiety and a nervousness so unlike Keith that it rattled Lance. Gone was the purple skin, the claws, the sharp peak of his ears. And Lance almost didn’t notice

He was Keith again, but he was different in the same way that they were all different.

“How are you doing?” Lance asked. The moment he said it he regretted it. He was halfway to slapping himself in the face, aware of the eyes of the rest of them drifting to stare at him, the conversations drawing almost to a halt once more.

Keith looked at him as if he were stupid. It was a familiar look. He was Keith again. If there had been any doubt before, the look he gave Lance was enough to dispel it. “I’m terrible,” he said, but his mouth twitched almost into a smile. “You look awful, by the way.”

Lance grinned, completely and utterly offended. The conversations around them picked back up slowly. “You’re hardly one to talk, Keith.”

He shrugged and reached a hand up to tap it against the side of his face. His hand still shook. “The dinosaurs give you that?”

Lance had his spoon halfway to his mouth but he dropped it back into the bowl, startled. He swallowed, trying to run through his mind everything he had said to Keith back when he was Zombie Keith, through everything the rest of them had said. He had heard all of it. He remembered all of it. “Yeah,” he whispered at last, reaching up and touching the scar. He forced a smile. “Fucking dinosaurs.”

 

It was the rhythm they fell into, that night at dinner and the next morning. Keith was far from anywhere near  _ fine _ , but he faked it and hid it well. His conversations with them were still terse and barely there, but it was something. Shiro looked relieved every time he showed up. At some point him and Allura had stopped staying with him. He always came down, though, with heavy rings under his eyes and a tired demeanor.

He wasn’t sleeping, still. Lance shared a wall with him, he  _ knew _ . He woke when Keith woke with a strangled cry and every time he had to force himself not to run from his room and over to his. There was pushback, still, from any and all assistance they tried to give him. Shiro had told them to let it be, for now.

Forcing help onto him wouldn’t do anything for him but keep him from reaching out when he was finally ready.

 

Lance woke to Keith’s frantic scream a few nights later and he sighed and sat up, hesitant but resigned to no more proper sleep that night. Shiro had quietly suggested, once more, that he move to another room but Lance had refused. It felt terrible to move his room around for his own convenience. And besides, he was  _ close, _ if Keith ever reached a point where he needed him.

There was movement in Keith’s room, the faint thud of footsteps and then Lance heard his door slide open. Lance stood then and stepped over to his own door, worried where Keith might be headed. There was a soft knock just as Lance moved to open it.

It slid open to reveal Keith.

“Hey,” Lance said as if they had just run into each other in passing and weren’t currently standing on opposite sides of his doorway. Keith looked anywhere but at him. “You can, uhh, you can come in,” Lance continued awkwardly, stepping aside.

Keith didn’t budge. “I can’t sleep,” he whispered. “I’ve been keeping you awake, haven’t I?”

Lance looked away and Keith finally stepped in. The door whirred closed behind him. He debated between telling Keith the truth or lying. It didn’t seem fair to lie to him. He deserved the truth. “Yeah, I’ve barely slept.”

Keith sighed and stalked over to the bed opposite Lance’s own. He didn’t quite settle in there but the way he sat on it reminded Lance of sitting across from Keith all night, his yellow eyes boring into him as he just  _ sat _ there. He shuddered. Keith looked at him and then shifted. “I can go, I mean, if you don’t—”

Lance shook his head stepping over. “No, it’s fine. You can stay.” He was hesitant, though, as he approached. Keith was wary about any contact, had flinched when near every single one of them so far. Just the day before he had bumped into Allura in the kitchen and had jerked away from her so fast he had dropped his bowl and shattered it and sent green goo spilling against the floor.

Keith didn’t so much as draw away. He moved over and patted the bed next to him. Lance hesitated again but finally slipped into the bed and settled in next to him. Keith was tense, with him so close, but he didn’t move away. He didn’t speak, either, for a long while. Lance almost nodded off.

“You’re all different,” he said at last and Lance fought down a yawn, glancing his way.

“It’s been a year,” Lance supplied.

The thing about changes was that they were subtle, when you experienced them day by day. Changes were not so noticeable, then, they just happened. You didn’t suddenly wake up one day and notice you had changed. You didn’t notice a change day by day. But the thing about not having been there through the day by day changes was that the changes were noticeably. Keith was changed. He was taller, his face still sharp but unmistakably older in the angle of his jaw and the cut of his chin.

Lance, though, couldn’t really pinpoint what had changed about him. He couldn’t pick a moment when it had occurred or a day in which he had woken and realized he was different. He just  _ was _ different, and it had happened slowly over a year.

“You look older,” Keith said at last, as if he had said what he had said with no real thought as to why or where he wanted to go with it.

Lance smiled. “So do you.”

Keith was quiet again for a long moment. “I didn’t know,” he said at last.

“Hmm?” Lance fought and failed to suppress another yawn.

“That I was Galra, or— Part Galra, or whatever.” Keith took a deep breath that shuddered heavy through his chest. “I convinced myself they had done this to me, I—” He stopped, lifting his hands to look down at them. Then he looked over at Lance. “Pidge knew. She told me.  _ Before _ , I mean. When I was—”

If his comment about the dinosaurs wasn’t confirmation enough, this was it. Pidge had spoken to him and now he wondered what about. It wasn’t his place, though. He wondered if it had something to do with the way she was acting now. Skittish around all of them, quiet.

“I’m sorry,” Keith said. “That I keep waking you up.”

Lance shook his head. “I have my own nightmares,” he told him.

“About the dinosaurs?” Keith cracked a smile. Lance couldn’t bring himself to smile, though.

“No,” he whispered. “Not about the dinosaurs.”

Keith shifted and Lance thought for a moment he would pull away. He didn’t. He moved closer. “Do you want to talk about it?”

Lance looked at him and met his eyes. “Do  _ you _ want to talk about it?”

Keith surprised him. “Yeah,” he said. “I think I’m ready to, yeah.”

“I killed people,” Lance told him. “Galra, I mean.”

“The Galra are people,” Keith whispered. His hands tightened where he had them wrapped across his knees. Keith was Galra.  _ Part _ Galra. Still, he was Galra. He was people. He was their friend.

Lance looked away, awkward. “I know, but it’s easier, sometimes—”

“Yeah,” Keith croaked. “I know it is.”

“Sometimes it’s the dinosaurs, yeah,” Lance continued.

“You said you nearly starved, and, what was it?”

Lance laughed. “Name it. I nearly starved, nearly had my neck lopped off, it was an all around great time.” He fell quiet, considering. “But most of the time I just don’t sleep well. Comes with what we do, I suppose.”

“I nearly died too,” Keith whispered. He moved and curled his hand around his neck where Lance knew the scar was, peaking out only barely from behind the collar of his shirt.

“What happened?” Self inflicted, Coran had told them. He had tried to escape, perhaps.

“I came to, I guess you could say, and they’d just handed me my bayard. I made it all the way to the hangar before they cornered me and I was so scared they would take me back, I—” He stopped but Lance could fill in the blanks. “They took me to Haggar every day for almost a month, after.”

Lance remembered the way he had screamed when Allura touched him. She had done the same as Haggar had but her intentions had been good. Shiro had first whispered her name to them with heavy eyes and a minor tremor to his hand that told them everything they needed to know about her.

Keith didn’t keep his end of the bargain; he didn’t bring up his own dreams, his  _ nightmares. _

“You’re all so close, now.”

Lance had noticed but again, it was one of those subtle changes that could really only be noticed through an outside perspective. “Allura and Coran found us in all sorts of states. Afterwards, I guess we sort of had to. We  _ wanted _ to. And we had to fill in the—The hole you left behind, you know.”

“You’re all so close, now.”

Lance had noticed but again, it was one of those subtle changes that could really only be noticed through an outside perspective. “Allura and Coran found us in all sorts of states. Afterwards, I guess we sort of had to. We  _ wanted _ to. And we had to fill in the—The hole you left behind, you know.”

“Did you all really think I was dead?”

Lance thought back to his conversation of Pidge. It felt forever ago now that she had told him she was certain Keith was dead. It had been months, and somewhere in the time between he had come to maybe believe it himself. “Yeah,” He told Keith. “Yeah, we all did.”

 

Lance fell asleep at some point and he woke with a start to find himself slumped against Keith. Keith, though, was asleep, having laid down across the bed at some point. Lance didn’t know why he was so awake, now, but Keith was asleep and Lance wasn’t sure when he had last slept.

Lance was careful as he pulled himself away. The clock on the wall told him everyone would be in the kitchen in maybe another hour to eat whatever meal it was. He threw a blanket over Keith and then stepped into the bathroom to shower. By the time he stepped back out Keith was gone, but Lance could hear the sound of the water running from his room as he took his own shower.

He waited for him outside of his room, awkwardly leaning against the wall beside his door. He listened as Keith walked around and then, finally, his door slid open. He seemed prepared to find Lance there because he didn’t look surprised and he managed a weak smile, his hair still wet and messy around his head.

 

It was Pidge that said it, after taking one look at the two of them, arriving together, their hair still wet. “Did you two shower together, or something?”

Lance about tripped over his feet but Keith was completely unfazed as he dropped into his chair. “Yeah,” he said dryly and Lance sputtered, glaring at him.

“We did  _ not _ ,” he said and Keith laughed. It was startling, to hear him laugh. It was maybe the first time he had laughed since they had found him. Pidge laughed as well and Hunk, too, who shot them a look, waggling his eyebrows.

 

“You can stay with me,” Lance told him later. “If you don’t want to be alone. At night, I mean. Just, you don’t  _ have _ to, but it’s an open invitation.”

Keith shrugged, but he took the invitation because that night he joined Lance, and the night after that, and the night after that, until they eventually started falling asleep beside one another and waking in a tangle of limbs.

 

“I’m in pain,” Keith said. His voice told him how much, and the clench of his fist in the blanket told him how much. “Almost all the time, it  _ hurts _ .” His brow was often pinched but Lance had never really associated it with anything other than fatigue.

“You should tell Allura,” Lance whispered.

Keith shook his head and then groaned, hand flying up to his temple. “I can’t let her do that again, what she—” He shuddered and Lance again remembered how frantic his screaming had been. “I don’t want her to—”

Lance reached for him and he didn’t flinch away. Maybe it was a sign of progress. Maybe it was a sign that he was in too much pain to care. Lance hesitated either way but Keith met him halfway and caught his hand in his own. He was cold. Lance had never really noticed before but he was, his skin like ice, his hands rough and calloused. His hand in Lance’s hand was permission so Lance continued moving, shifting so that he was straddling his leg. “Does it help to put pressure on it?” he asked, eyes on the hand Keith had pressed there.

“A bit, yeah,” he mumbled. Lance shifted again, moving to catch his face between his hands. Keith tilted his head up into it and Lance pressed his fingers into the scarring there. It was soft, the tissue not quite raised but there, slight. More visible to the eyes than to the touch. Almost like bolts under his skin, spiraling outwards.

They were quiet, then, but Keith made a pleasant noise that might have been a sound of relief. The pain was still there, Lance could tell. The pinch in his brow was still there but his eyes twitched a bit less.

“Helps a bit,” he said, at last, when Lance finally moved away. Keith caught his wrist as he did, though, pulling him closer again. He was looking at him, eyes steadfastly meeting his.

“I heard what you said,” he said suddenly. Lance frowned, trying to place what it was he had said. “Before, I mean. I remember.” At the look of confusion on Lance's face he sighed and pushed himself upright. It was obscene, the way they were laid out across his bed. Keith, back on the bed, propped up with pillows, propped more forward with an arm, one knee bent. Lance, straddling his leg, one arm pressed against the wall to hold himself up. “When you were telling about the dinosaurs,” Keith murmured at last.

It hit Lance fast and he jerked away. “Oh,” he said. “ _ Oh _ .” He licked his lips, sitting back on the bed. Keith pulled himself upright as well, though with much more effort. “I didn’t really mean to—”

“I liked you, too,” Keith said at last. “I mean, I like you still.” He looked away and it was awkward, the silence that fell over them. Lance didn’t know what to say because it had been the furthest thing from his mind lately. Keith was fighting his own demons, they were still all fighting theirs.

He had hardly planned for a confession or for a confession back. He hadn’t really thought too far into what that meant or where to go from there, if it had even happened. But now his heart beat fast in his chest as he looked down at Keith, as he met smoldering eyes. He was  _ Keith, _ and suddenly everything that had happened fell away. The dinosaurs, all of the Galra he had killed, all of the torture Keith had endured. They were Keith and Lance, as they had been before, only now the words they’d refused to say before were bared to the world.

Keith kissed him with chapped lips and a cold hand curled around Lance’s neck. Lance let him lead, hesitant and careful, perhaps overly cautious, mindful of their proximity and the way they were tangled against one another. Keith was insistent, pressing Lance’s mouth open with his own, pressing his body against  his, escalating in a way that made Lance suddenly nervous.

““Don’t do this, too,” Keith murmured against Lance’s lips, breaking the kiss barely long enough to say it. “I’m not  _ broken.” _

“I know,” Lance whispered.

“Please,” Keith added, and by now he had pulled Lance atop him, so he straddled his waist. “Don’t treat me like I’m—like I’m fragile.”

Keith kissed him again and Lanced spelled out his understanding into it, opening for him as he had been hesitant to do before. “Okay,” he said. “ _ Okay.” _


End file.
